The Thief of Prospit
by Mitspeiler
Summary: A Thief and a Knight from the glittering city of Prospit fall in love with the royal siblings. When Princess Jade decrees that she will marry the man who brings her the finest treasure, the two undergo a quest together to win their affections. Meanwhile, agents of Derse infiltrate the city. A fantasy AU inspired by 1924 film The Thief of Bagdad, but not a crossover per se.
1. People Do Stupid Things For Love

The golden city of Prospit, a work of art in gold and brass and yellow marble, was already old when the first words were baked into clay tablets in the dawn days of humanity. It had fallen from the sky, or so claimed the trolls. It had always been there, and the rest of the world had grown up around it, say the Carapacians. The lone Cherub who has visited the city in all its recorded history merely laughed and shook her head before flying off. Regardless, its true origin has been lost to time, and the history of its people dates back only three hundred years, when the gates first opened under the White King's gentle touch. It is a city of scholars, dry and bright, and quiet, for the people there live in peace. Even the thieves.

The darkened city of Derse, a puzzle of iron and amethyst and black marble, lay on the opposite end of the blistering desert from its golden sister city, upon the very edge of the world. The Black King of legend had torn its great gates asunder some fifteen hundred years ago, or so its people claim. There are no stories of its origins, because its people do not tolerate such things, save that a Cherub once came near the city, and he blasted and burned the land for a hundred miles around, belching rainbow fire and hurling obscenities, but did not dare harm the city. Now, Derse is cold and wet, and dark for the sun rarely shines there. They are a city of warriors, hard and cruel and cunning, for they say you can always hear the whispers of those who dwell beyond the Earth's edge when you enter the city, and only the cruel and cunning can stand it.

This is the tale of how the two cities came to war, and how that conflict was resolved.

It happened one day that a peddling magician demonstrated his wares in Prospit to the delight of the crowd. The highlight of his act was what he claimed to be a magical rope. He waved his hand and spoke a word, and it uncoiled itself, rising into the air. Up and up and up it went, its dingy brown color standing out in stark contrast against the sunflower-yellow walls, until it passed by an open window and was snatched inside by a pale grey hand. On the other side of the building, the thief leapt from the window, black hair and brown rope streaming behind her as she took her flight, lips parted in a malefic grin.

Vriska did not get very far before the Knights of Prospit, alerted by the peddler's cries, gave chase. She wouldn't have had it any other way of course; the chase was the best part of a theft. Of course, the Knights were splendid warriors clad in golden armor, each suit an individual masterpiece of metallurgy, each Knight astride the finest riding-beasts the city with its near-limitless treasury could buy—

But out here on the cramped yellow side-streets of Prospit's slums, there was no way for them to maneuver. Vriska ran backwards, taunting the haughty riders, snapping her rope at them like a whip—it had been hers since she laid eyes on it of course—hurling insults and jabs, deftly dancing in and around the crush of people, who were barely aware of her passing by the time the majestic Knights shoved them aside.

Growing bored with this particular chase, Vriska threw her rope upward and it looped around the openwork spire of a nearby shop—Vriska loved how ostentatious this city was—and she swung herself up onto its roof. Climbing spider-like up the side of the spire, she made a daring leap for the roof of another building, and sprinted across it. Spying some laundry hanging out to dry, she quickly swapped out her own blue clothes for an orange blouse and skirt. She used the other clothes on the line to make a human shaped bundle, dressed it in her discarded rags, and hurled the dummy off the roof. She then ran in the opposite direction.

It was easy to move from rooftop to rooftop now, as well as incredibly fun; she found she loved the sensation of the air rushing past her face as she hurled along over the ground, five, six, seven, eight stories below. She should have stolen a magic rope ages ago. Ten minutes later, she was resting on a rooftop, breathing heavily and content. Up above, the countless spires of Prospit towered up toward the sky, a spider web of gold against a backdrop of deepest blue. She was higher than she'd ever been, and there was still so much to go to reach the top. Had anyone ever reached that high? People had only been living here three centuries after all; maybe no one had. Vriska took a moment to admire her locket. It was heavy and oval shaped and made of gold. Vriska had stolen the thing long ago and positively fallen in love with it, going so far as to engrave it with her own name. She almost opened it, but stopped herself. Even up here someone might see—

She was stirred from her reverie by the clanging of the bells; she realized that she was on the roof of one of Prospit's countless cathedrals. Sure enough, she'd been resting her head against the great glass dome of Domina Nostrum de Fortuna. On a whim she climbed the dome until she stood directly on top, looking down on the congregation hundreds of feet below. There was a circular hole the size of her head there, left purposefully empty to let in the divine light of the Sufferer. It was encircled by a heavy ring of pure gold inscribed with something in Old High Trollish. Vriska pulled her knife and started trying to pull it off.

Mass was in session. The priestess was young and pretty, completely wasted on the priesthood, Vriska thought. Those gaudy gold and orange robes looked awful on her. The ring was stubborn and partially wrapped around the iron frame of the dome. Only barely though; she could just pop it out if she tried. Just needed to get her knife under it. The priestess had a friendly face and a high clear voice that rang up all the way to—however high Vriska was. Maybe the _real_ purpose of the dome was to act as an amplifier?

Vriska hadn't been to church in ages—people assumed she'd been just trying to pick the rich people's pockets and they'd kept her out. It had hurt a lot as a child, when she'd still been a believer. Then she realized the Sufferer had never done anything for her, so she'd not do anything for him either. It wasn't so much that she was atheist; rather Vriska and God simply no longer associated with each other by mutual agreement.

The priestess was talking about how the Sufferer helped those who helped themselves; that people made their own luck and all happiness must be earned. Well, that was true enough, Vriska supposed. She could see him, or rather Him, there behind the priestess, a heroically tall figure of pure green marble so dark it was almost black, held up with real iron chains. She thought he looked pompous. Someone that muscular could probably break those chains; what had he been trying to pr—?

With a loud _*pop*_, the ring came out and Vriska fell back onto the dome, cracking it, then sliding down the rest of its length, gaining speed until she went rocketing off the roof. Not once did she think anything inane like 'this is how I die' or some such. She just calmly flicked her rope and it wrapped itself around some gargoyle or other—

And swung her face-first into a stained-glass window depicting His final sermon. Vriska's nose unleashed a magnificent spray of cobalt blood as it smushed against His visage. With her vision eight-fold, she could just barely see the people inside gawking; they'd probably been alerted by the _*pop*_ and the _*crack*,_ now there was this_…*plunk_*. No matter, once she got back onto the roof she'd be as good as free. The rope started pulling her up. She hadn't known it could do that.

It couldn't. She was being hauled up by a Knight of Prospit. He was dressed in uniform, not plate, but Vriska can always tell a Knight. "You think you're a clever little bitch huh? Actually, it just turns out every other member of the order is just terminally stupid. I swear they let anyone put on the gold if they can sign their names. Me though, I'm actually competent. You took too long on that rooftop and I realized what you were up to. It was just a matter of ditching my solid-gold bullshit-armor and running after you on—"

Vriska scowled. She recognized this particular knight's dulcet tones. Almost without thinking, she smashed the stolen ring against his helmet, knocking him to the ground, then prized it off his face, revealing—

"Dammit Vantas," said Vriska, smirking. "Still interfering in my business after all these years!"

Karkat sneered. "Vriska Serket, I thought you'd be dead by now. Get off me!"

She stood and helped him up. "Now give me the rope and the ring and anything else you might have stolen," he said, proffering his hand.

She laughed in his face. "I've forgotten how funny you are Karkat. It seems knighthood has only improved your sense of humor." She sauntered off as if she hadn't a care in the world. "It's been fun catching up Karkles," she said with a salute. "Maybe you'll arrest me again some other time." She flipped on his helmet with a flourish.

Karkat growled and ran after her, yanking the helmet off her head with one hand and twisting her arm behind her back with the other. "Just give back the stuff, eh?" he said. "I'll let you go. I'll give the ring to the priestess and I'll even give you some coins for the rope. Hell, I'll buy you dinner. My God, you look half-starved—"

Vriska twisted her leg behind his and tripped him onto his back, then sat on his stomach. "How chivalrous of you," she mocked, holding her nose to stanch the bloodflow, "offering the poor street rat some food. Is that how you sleep at night? You know what your problem is? You think you're so much better than me, even though just five years ago you were right where I was, stealing to survive—"

Karkat, being well-fed and a trained soldier, pushed her off with ease and loomed over her. "No Vriska, _I_ was the one who stole to survive. _You_ stole because you are a goddamn tiding of magpies that God smushed into troll form! I took the first chance I could to get out of that situation and now I'm a goddamn Knight of Prospit. People call me sir and give me pies and ask me to kiss their babies. You on the other hand, are living on the streets and weigh like five pounds so just let me fucking help you already," he said, pulling her up.

She gave a long-suffering groan as Karkat cleaned off her face with his handkerchief. "If it'll help your high-class guilt, then fine, I'll let you buy me lunch. I know a place on the White King's Boulevard that has really good trash. Imagine what it'll taste like fresh. Hey, carry my shit," she said, as she shoved the ring into Karkat's chest with enough force to stagger him and headed for what appeared to be a gilded fire escape.

"Hey, Vriska, the chain," he said, jogging after her.

"Huh?" she said, turning her head slightly.

"Don't play dumb," he said, pulling off her locket. She realized she hadn't tucked it back in under her clothes. She turned a vivid blue as he examined it, feeling as if she were about to die of heat-stroke. She silently prayed to the God she had ignored for years that Karkat would be unable to open—

_*click*_ It opened. Karkat laughed until he was red in the face. Inside was a tiny but highly detailed portrait of the Royal Heir, crown prince John Crocker. Vriska punched Karkat in the face. He kept laughing, so she kept punching him, over and over until her hands were filthy with the red blood that she'd never been able to help but think of as disgusting, some instinctual hatred for it buried deep in her genetics.

He still kept laughing, and she grabbed him by the fucking neck—and felt something hard and oval-shaped under her palm. Vriska reached in under his uniform, grinning, and pulled out a nearly identical locket. She snapped the chain and opened it before Karkat could even realize what was happening. "No fucking way," she giggled. His locket contained a picture of princess Jade Crocker. "You are such a loser Karkat!" she said. "Princess Jade? _Jaaaaaaaade_? She's not even pretty!"

He growled and lunged for his locket. Vriska grabbed his face and dangled the thing over the edge. He stopped and took a step back. "Yes she is! And at least I've spoken with Jade a couple of times. She's nice to me! And funny, and energetic, and she can ride, and shoot better than any man. She's _fascinating_! You've probably seen _him_ a grand total of once!"

Vriska scowled. "Have you met him?"

Karkat raised an eyebrow.

"Well?" she shouted, making as if to throw the locket.

"He's an ass," said Karkat with a wicked grin. "A fucking man-child. He thinks it's so great that I, a knight, would hang out with him at all. Completely underestimates his own importance. Wants to go out among the common people and let his presence be known. He doesn't have the spine to be a king; his heart's too big."

Vriska bit down hard on her lip. She scowled at Karkat, but only did so because she was trying not to smile. That was exactly how she'd always imagined the Royal Heir to behave. A thought occurred.

"Soooooooo," she said, sidling up to Karkat and handing him back his locket. He snatched it out of her hand and grudgingly gave hers back. "Do you think that, on account of our old friendship, you might be able to get me into the palace tomorrow?" She flashed him her winningest smile.

"No," he said, stepping back. "Knowing you you'll just try to kidnap the Heir or some stupid bullshit. I'm not having it." Vriska twisted her lip. "Don't give me that," he warned. "Even if I wanted to, which I don't, the suitors are coming from Derse tomorrow. Security is going to be so tight, not even a fly can get in without being patted down first."

Vriska's heart skipped a beat. "Suitors?"

Karkat nodded, sighing wistfully. "Jade is going to choose her future husband tomorrow."

Vriska exhaled in relief. Karkat shook his head. "You don't understand. They're twins; that means they were both birthed by the same lusus simultaneously. Humans like that do everything together. Jade demanded to have suitors, because John is getting married in three months." She was not as devastated as she thought she would be. The cogs in Vriska's head began to turn, slowly but inexorably formulating a plan.

Karkat rolled his eyes at her. "What chance do we have, huh?" He sat down at the foot of a spire that rose another hundred feet yet off the cathedral roof. Even though the sun was rarely visible from the streets, it was always so bright out. "A freak-blooded ex-streetrat and a sociopathic kleptomaniac? Why would princes and princesses want anything to do with the likes of us?" He finally wiped off his own face. The handkerchief became a very fetching purple.

Vriska plopped down next Karkat, stomach growling loudly. She leaned against his shoulder. "Yeah, it sucks to be us. We're still on for lunch though?"

He slapped his forehead with the bloody rag, smearing his face in purple, and nodded. "Well, then," said Vriska, in a low husky voice. "How am I going to repay you afterwards? I wonder…." She kissed his cheek.

Karkat groaned. "There's no need for that, I offered because you're an old friend and you're down on your luck, not because I want to get laid! Besides, you already know I'm," he grit his teeth, "in love with someone else."

"Yeah, well, so am I," she whispered in his ear. "We can find solace in each other's arms, or some bullshit like in those books you used to read." She stroked his knee with one finger. "You knoooooooow," she said, as she pulled out a tortoiseshell comb that had been someone else's this morning. Karkat gulped in extreme discomfort. "Some people say that I look _exactly_ like Princess Jade when I bother to do my hair."

He reddened. "That is completely unacceptable Vriska! First of all you look nothing like Jade. Second of all, I thought of you as an incredibly annoying friend back in the day; this would be so weird. It'd be like if a human did it with his sister. Third of all the thought of—with—because she looks like—that's just sick! There would have to be something really, really wrong with me—"

Vriska ignored him, combing out her long black hair. It had been entirely too long since the last time. She'd seen the princess a few times on parade. Usually Vriska had been paying attention to her brother, but she had a good eye for faces. She gave Karkat a big happy smile like Vriska had often seen the princess give. There was no trace of her usual malice or cunning, the smile was all Jade.

Well, that and just a touch of Vriska's mind-powers.

Karkat shut up for a second. Snapping out of it, he shouted, "No! NO! You are sick in the head Vriska! And probably trying to mind-control me!"

Vriska giggled prettily, stroking the back of Karkat's hand before he snatched it away. "Don't you remember the last time I used my powers on you? You described it as being hit in the brain with a sledgehammer. And I always had to touch my forehead and scrunch up my face in concentration so hard I almost popped a vein! Do I look like I'm doing any of that now?" she asked, fluttering her eyelashes. In truth, Vriska had learned subtlety in all her years since Karkat ran off to the Knight's Academy. Mind-control took a lot of energy, which was something she needed to budget with her limited diet. But Karkat didn't know that. "I have green contact lenses," she whispered. He screamed.

"I know what you're doing," he said, jumping to his feet. He turned and faced her, pointing an accusatory finger. "You're going to seduce me, and then I'm going to feel stupidly guilty, and then I'm going to sneak you into the palace tomorrow out of guilt, and then you're going to mind control the Royal Heir and become a fucking tyrant queen and it'll be all my fault and I'll sure as fuck be the first one against the wall when the executions start because I called you a psycho-bitch that one time—"

Tired of games, Vriska touched her forehead, face screwing up with concentration, and said through grit fangs, "Whatever do you mean Karkat? I just want to repay you for the fine lunch you're about to buy me!" Scorpios in his eyes, Karkat nodded.

After the best lunch Vriska had ever had, consisting of every domesticated terrestrial animal plus an entire lobster and a baked potato, she took him back to her apartment. In actuality, the real owner was simply out of town, but this was another thing that Karkat didn't need to know.

"Make yourself comfortable," she said, pushing him down onto the bed. Swimming in the intoxication of her mental venom, Karkat hastily began removing his clothes. When he was done, Vriska looked at him appraisingly, and smirked. She reached under her blouse—

And pulled free the magic rope, throwing it at Karkat, where it wound itself up instantly, securing him to the bed.

The next day, Vriska rode into the palace disguised as a Knight of Prospit, Karkat's heavy war-sickle at her side, his proud white riding-beast nickering beneath her legs. She hated riding. If she had Taurus powers, she'd be just fine with it, but noooooooo. It took all of her strength plus the magic rope just to steer the stupid thing. Of course she'd recovered it, the magic rope. It was too valuable to leave with Karkat. She'd tied him up with mundane rope and then removed the magic one, using it to synch his trousers to her waist. She was going to see the Royal Heir if it killed her, and she was going to make him hers.

The gates were marked with an X taller than the dome of the Cathedral Domina Nostrum de Fortuna, and they did not open like doors. The X split like an overripe fruit and the gargantuan four-leafed gate opened like the mouth of some enormous creature preparing to swallow the thief, insignificant in comparison. One leaf went upwards, one sank into the ground, and the other two retreated into the walls. Each had teeth to keep them locked together. Truly, the palace was a gigantic creature, a dragon that had swallowed its own hoard for safe-keeping. Vriska would ride into its mouth and escape with its greatest treasure.

At midday, Princess Jade watched the procession of suitors, escorted by the gilded Knights of Prospit. Their blacks and purples were like stains on the golden streets of her city. "Maybe this wasn't such a good idea," she muttered. But when she thought of the alternative, either staying a spinster here in the city while her brother matured and started a family or being married off later and having to leave all of _this_ behind—

It didn't bear thinking about. "Hey princess," said a voice, at once calm and nervous, its tones rising and falling like waves, touched with a slight lisp. Sollux. Jade turned away from the window and smiled at the troll. The court mage, from no one knew where. A place he called 'the devil's machine,' and would speak no more of it. "Your Seer is here to talk to you. Tell her I'm not some fucking messenger boy," he turned on his heel, black cloak flaring dramatically. Jade giggled. The troll was in a serious mood today. Of course, all of his moods were funny in their own way.

Terezi walked in almost immediately after him and gave a terse bow. Jade clicked her tongue. "We're friends aren't we? There's no need for that!"

Terezi straightened, grinning. "Of course we are, but when he shuns proper decorum, I feel I have to show him how it's done." She crossed the room in a few easy strides and sat down at Jade's table. "Let's see what your future has in store, shall we?"

Jade nodded enthusiastically, although the Seer was quite blind. Terezi had said she could still tell from the vibrations in the air, so Jade didn't feel the need to confirm that she had nodded, instead asking, "Are we gonna use the cards today? Ooh, or dragon bones? That's always fun!"

Terezi laughed. "I'm gonna level with you Jade, that stuff's all bullshit." She raised a hand to interrupt Jade's inevitable protest. "I _am_ an actual Seer, and a very good one in fact. Probably the best unless the Dersite Princess is as good as they claim. But I use all that other stuff for show. Most people don't buy it when you just say what's gonna happen, you need to give them vague prophecies and cryptic fortunes or they'll think you're a hack. But since today's your special day," she said, lowering her sunglasses and offering a wink of her red, red eye, "I figure I'll give you a taste of the real shit."

She produced a huge white ball, glowing a gentle electric green. Jade 'oohed'. "So what do you want to know? Wait, I already know; 'who am I going to choose?' you ask. Good question! But first," she said with dramatic flair, "let's look at who's up to the challenge!"

She tapped the ball, and an image appeared in its center. A handsome young man in dark glasses, dressed all in royal purple, with a greatsword at his belt. His hair was white as driven snow. "Sir Strider, the king's bastard son. Captain of the Knights of Derse. They say he can never die in battle and that his sword can cleave through rock and steel. He's also a pretty one," she said, wiggling her eyebrows.

Jade blushed. "He certainly does look cool," she said. "But just a little full of himself."

"If you don't want him I'll take him," she cackled. Terezi tapped the ball again. This time an arrogant young troll appeared, with horns like lightning. "Eridan Ampora, prince of the seatrolls. He was given to Derse as a hostage after their war and raised as the King's ward. They say there's no better marksman in the world. But maybe you could give him a run for his money?" Said Terezi.

Jade cringed. "Oh God no! The arrogance is dripping off him like dew! I'd _die_ if I married him!" she laughed.

Terezi agreed. The image changed again. Another troll, this one a gargantuan highblood, with broken horns and broken teeth. "Equius, another ward. Where the seatrolls failed, the landtrolls succeeded; he's the Royal Heir and forced the King's actual son to go unacknowledged. They say he's a gentle soul though, and the strongest man alive—why are you laughing?"

Jade was not only laughing but laughing hysterically. "I'm sure he's a nice guy, but sweat is dripping off him like the arrogance off his brother! He doesn't need a wife, he needs a towel."

Terezi chuckled and tapped the ball again. It shifted to reveal a Carapacian dressed all in black, coat emblazoned with white spades. For some reason his face filled Jade with terror and she scooted back. "I don't care, don't tell me anything. The less I know the better. I just—not him, no never! I'd rather Eridan!"

Terezi shrugged. "There's just one more."

Jade raised an eyebrow. "I thought they were sending fifteen?"

Terezi nodded. "There's only five worth talking about though." She tapped the ball a final time and the image switched from the Carapacian's hateful visage to a young man, running through the streets half dressed calling for his riding-beast.

Could it be— "Sir Karkat?" Jade shouted, startled. "But he's not from Derse—"

"He's a potential suitor."

"But…." It occurred to Jade how much the young knight lavished on her on the rare occasions they spoke. She'd taken it for loyalty, but could it have been something else? She colored. Clearing her throat, she said "Well, at least he's someone I know. He can be a real ass sometimes though. Ugh, why can't anyone just be perfect?" Terezi laughed. "I guess, if I had to choose right now, I'd pick—"

Terezi interrupted. "It's immaterial what you want, Jade honey." Terezi hefted her cane and pointed it out the window. "What's the first thing you see?"

Jade ran up to the window, excited. "The rose tree in the garden!" she shouted. "Isn't that Dersite princess named Rose? Maybe it's a portent—"

Terezi shushed her. "I'll tell you what's a portent, dear. No, no," the Seer shook her head in faux disappointment, "what's really going on is this. Whichever suitor plucks a flower from that tree first will marry a Prospitian royal." Jade paled.

"What if it's—what if it's—" Terezi stood up to leave. "No, Terezi, please stay!" Jade said, grabbing the Seer, "you can't—"

"Holy shit," said Terezi, pointing at the window. "Did the sweaty guy just touch the rose tree?!" Jade turned to look out the window while Terezi ran off into the hall, cackling madly. Jade sighed. It seems she had an entire day of staring at a tree to get to.

Once she was past the gate, the riding-beast decided that it had fulfilled its bargain and bucked Vriska into a tree before running off into the stables. "You better run!" she shouted, shaking her fist at the creature, "and you better never come back because the next time I see you there's only gonna be glue left you awful piece of shit!" She then spent the next half hour trying to extricate herself from the tree, and found she was quite stuck.

"Well, there go my dreams of eternal happiness," she said, all shouted out and now more bemused than sad. The palace gardens had a lot more free space above them than any other part of the city she had seen. The sky above was a massive wedge of blue, fringed to the north and south with the hundred thousand spires of Prospit. It looked like an eye, with a white-hot pupil, blue iris, and a shimmering sclera of jagged gold. Stuck as she was in what was tantamount to a giant thorn bush, Vriska found it was very peaceful out here. Supposedly her people had long ago come from a world where the sun could kill. On this world, the sun healed. She wanted to bask in its glow for a while yet, maybe get some sleep—

"Hey fuckass, nice shirt!" Karkat shouted as he grabbed her by the lapels.

Vriska yawned. "Hey Karkles, we really need to stop meeting like this." He ignored her and reached for her waist, drawing his shimmering war-sickle. Vriska's eyes widened. "You, uh sure you want to do that—?"

The look in his eyes brooked no argument. Vriska swallowed, then pulled her arm free, slapped him in the face, and then touched her forehead, unleashing a psychic barrage like she'd never unleashed before, struggling against the immovable hardness of his mind—

Immovable? Karkat grinned and removed his helmet. He was wearing a hat made of aluminum foil underneath. "Cost me a fucking arm and a leg, but you're worth it aren't you Vriska?" He hefted the war-sickle and brought it down.


	2. In Which Much is Lost

The war-sickle chopped through the branches of the rose tree easily, and within moments Vriska was free. "I knew you were gonna cut me down you know," she said, as she fell to the ground in a shower of golden rose-petals. Most of her body was asleep.

An entire, unblemished rose had stuck itself in her hair. Karkat absentmindedly plucked it out before saying, "Yeah, that's why you panicked as if you were scared for your life and blasted me with enough psychic power to euthanize a trumpet-beast." He produced a pair of handcuffs. "Okay, you're clearly a danger to yourself and others, so I'm going to have to arrest you for real this time."

Vriska nodded, standing up and holding out her arms with a sigh of defeat. She then kicked Karkat in the bulge and ran off. "Goddamned crazy bitch!" he shouted as he writhed on the lawn. He stood up, but damned if Vriska didn't have strong legs; he fell down immediately from the pain and was certain that his virility had been damaged.

Roughly a minute passed in agony until he heard footsteps padding towards him across the grass. "Oh God, Karkat! Who was that?" He looked up into the luminescent green eyes of the Princess. There wasn't nearly enough green in this city, he thought, as he scrambled to get into a more nonchalant position, causing him to hurt himself more. "Don't move," said Jade, "I'll call for help—"

"Wait," said Karkat, on sudden impulse offering the rose that he realized was still clutched tightly in his hand. It was only a little crushed. He'd also cut his hand on the thorns and stained the entire stem red. Oh God he was an idiot—

Jade beamed, accepting the flower, a slight blush coloring her cheeks.

Vriska stalked through the palace, slinking and sneaking with lithe, predatory grace. It wasn't even hard, creeping along, hiding behind statues, crawling up the intricately carved walls. Every single brick in the palace was carved so intricately that it was practically easier to climb than to walk, and the highly irregular shapes did strange things to acoustics. She could walk right beside a person and not be heard, or make it so it sounded as if she were on the opposite side of the room. Guards hustled passed occasionally, hulking Carapacian Paladins, in full ceremonial plate depicting the Four Origins, holding banners stiff with thread-of-gold. They didn't seem to be looking for anyone, she thought, as she hung upside down from the magic rope, watching them pass. Vriska was sure Karkat would have raised the alarm by now. Ah, well.

After searching for what must have been an hour, she finally found John, standing on a balcony overlooking the city. 'Overlooking' she thought, stifling a laugh. The spires of Prospit reached much higher than this little balcony. The highest point of the city was all the way across the city at the Southern Gate, the doors of which were held up by the Four Heroes representing the fundamental forces of the universe; the Great Witch's pointed ears made her the highest structure in the world.

But John. Her portrait didn't do him justice, because it made him too perfect, too regal and heroic. He had the face of a boy who laughed a lot, and enjoyed making others laugh. He was strong looking, but not heroic of build at all. He looked like an ordinary person, only more so. Karkat was right about one thing; he didn't have the face of a king. John had the face of a trickster. He was dressed in a uniform, royal blue, with an ornate war-hammer at his waist. Vriska thought there wasn't enough blue in this city.

She felt herself smirking and immediately cut it out. She touched her forehead and unleashed—

Her stomach growled. She'd used up all her stored power on Karkat. For no particular reason at all, John turned. "Shit," she said.

"Hi," he said, smiling.

Vriska flushed deeply. "Um, hi." She noticed her hand was still on her forehead and quickly put it away behind her back.

"Are you new here?" he asked.

"Um, you could say that…."

"So you're a woman knight? That's interesting."

"Actually I'm a thief," she said without thinking, then clapped her hand over her mouth.

"Cool!" John announced. "Are you here on a daring raid to steal our jewels and stuff? I could show you where the good ones are."

Vriska gawked at him. Her stomach rumbled. "Maybe we should get you some food first," he said, taking her by the hand. This was not going as planned, thought Vriska, but she found she much preferred it.

A while later they were sitting in a secluded nook in the kitchens, scarfing down a basketful of muffins. Even here, they were watched over by the golden gaze of ancient chefs carved in bass-relief on the walls, even the most portly of them rendered regal by whatever cosmic mason had sculpted the city in the dawn of time. John found he really enjoyed talking to Vriska. She'd opened up and started speaking more candidly after her third or so muffin. She was everything he was not; cunning, pessimistic, self-absorbed, calculating, mature, and highly intelligent. While many of those might be seen as negative qualities, John didn't see them as such. She had her own sort of honor, and a unique kind of nobility. John had the feeling that the two of them together might make a single sensible person. He felt a pang, thinking he should have met her sooner.

He was about to tell her as much when a handful of Knights bust down the door to the kitchen and shouted at her to step away from him. Vriska stood up, still holding a muffin, and reached for her waist—

And calmly hurled a rope at the lead Knight, which promptly tangled itself around his feet. She leapt forward, snatching up his short sword and feinted at the next Knight. He parried the blow and Vriska simply let go of the weapon, swerving around the knight as he over-extended himself and fell flat on his face. She then smashed her muffin into the third Knight's eyes, taking his lance and using it to trip the fourth. Then she was out the door, with nothing but a last wistful look at John. Out the door, he thought, and almost certainly out of his life forever.

He was wrong.

They caught Vriska eventually. In her panic she forgot how to work _with_ the stupid building and had ignored the weird acoustics, running into another squadron of Paladins rather than away from them as she had assumed. She'd put up a bit of a fight, but without her rope Karkat's pants fell and tripped her up at a crucial moment. The massive Carapacian had glared at her as he brought the butt of his spear down on her head.

She awoke being dragged into a huge room of much darker yellow than anywhere else she'd seen. The stones here were not smooth marble or carved brick but big, rough blocks that scraped her knees as they dragged. She glared up at the two Knights at her sides. They didn't even look at her. They set her on a large grating, bigger across than she was tall, made of iron, not gold or brass. She blinked, realizing how infrequently she had seen that metal in her life. Something stirred down there in the depths. It was so far down she couldn't see, but she could swear she heard giggling. Vriska tried not to shiver.

Ahead, there was a throne, carved from the same dull yellow stone, depicting a grinning death's head. In front of it there was a chair, much nicer, plated with gold and set with amethysts and purple plush cushions. Something seemed wrong about that. Seated on the chair was a short, squinty-eyed Carapacian of the black-shelled variety. He was bent foreward, as if accustomed to stooping. The Carapacian was dressed richly and held a golden rod in his hands.

The Ascendant Regent had ruled in Prospit ever since the death of Prince-Consort Jake, after which Queen Jane had gone into seclusion. The royal twins were too young to rule according to the law, and so he held the reins on the kingdom. "Fuck you I didn't do shit!" said Karkat, on his knees in front of the Regent with his hands manacled behind him. He seemed to have gotten roughed up a lot worse than Vriska had been. Part of the reason the palace only employed Carapacian Knights was because they were known to be traditional and gentlemanly, and Vriska was glad for that after seeing the mass of cuts bruises on her old friend's face. They were purple like a human's, she noted with mild irritation. Trolls were supposed to bruise the same color as their blood.

"Why was this one not blindfolded?" the Ascendant Regent demanded, pointing at Vriska. One of Vriska's Knights quickly shoved a bag over her head. Of course with her vision eight-fold she could still see perfectly fine. This was better in fact; she wouldn't have to hide who she was looking at.

"You know," said Vriska, feeling the need to snark, "I don't need eye-contact to control people." She only needed a full stomach in fact, but she couldn't do much with some half digested muffins that her body was already using to make up for her head injury. Still, need-to-know basis.

Oddly enough, the Ascendant Regent ignored her and turned back to Karkat. "That is exactly the point, isn't it?" said he in a biting tone. "You allowed this creature to steal your uniform and identification. You allowed her to enact her vicious plan to abduct the Heir—"

"You can't prove that's what she was going to do—"

"And," boomed the Regent, "when you had the opportunity bring her to justice, you allowed her to escape and instead took the time to seduce the princess!"

Vriska beamed. "Way to go Karkat! Didn't know you had it in you!"

Karkat growled. "Shut up Vriska!"

The Regent was aghast. "You know each other!? This stinks of a conspiracy! You will be _shot_ for this Vantas—"

The doors burst open once again and Princess Jade rushed in with an expression of fierce determination, followed by some troll dressed in red and teal, bearing her sharp teeth in a vicious smile. Vriska still didn't see what the big deal about the princess was. So she had nice skin. And pretty eyes. And gorgeous hair. But that was it. "Karkat did _not_ seduce me!"

The Regent sputtered. "This is a secret chamber!"

Ignoring him, Jade went on. "He was injured and I helped him. Then we talked for an hour or two. It was nice. We know each other well and it should not come as a surprise that we enjoy each other's company."

"Regardless," the Regent boomed, "Through his negligence, he allowed a vicious criminal to actually lay hands on the Royal Heir. This is inexcusable, and he must be punished—"

Jade was still speaking, vying to be heard over the Regent's voice. "Besides, the Seer told me that he is my future husband!" Although she wasn't as loud as he was, her voice had certain quality that cut right through his pure decibel power. The room fell silent.

R-really?" asked Karkat, a stupid grin cutting through the ruin that was his face. Vriska rolled her eyes.

"Yes I did!" said the new troll, striking a glamorous pose. "You can't fight fate AR, everyone knows that. If you do you'll be cursed. You'll lose everyone you've ever loved as your shell turns grey and blotchy with mange. Your house will be struck down by a mighty wind and you'll develop nasty sores on your junk, which will eventually fall off. Then finally as you wallow in your misery begging for death, your head will burst like an overripe pumpkin. That's how you'll die, alone and unmourned except for the worms digging though your exploded brain." She leered over her sunglasses, boring into the Regent with blind eyes that somehow still saw—

"Don't try to sway his judgment with your pagan witchery," said a new voice, smooth as silk, while another like the barking of a dog shouted "I want their fucking heads on pikes!"

In stepped another pair of black Carapacians, one calm and collected, the other a sneering savage. "Good evening my lord Regent," said the one in the lead, pulling his fellow into an elegant bow. "I am a dignitary of Derse, representing arch-agent Jack Noir, here to bid for the princess's hand." He strode over to the chair where the Regent was sitting, making the little man seem petty by comparison. _This_ was what a king acted like. He muttered something about his secret chamber.

The Dignitary said, "The suitors from Derse are gravely insulted at this breach of security on the very day of their arrival. What's more, the royal siblings did not even meet with their respective romantic pairings as they were meant to due to this fiasco and _am I boring you Madame_?"

The Seer was yawning dramatically while Jade tried not to laugh. "I'm sorry," said the Seer, "I started tuning you out when you denounced the state religion as 'pagan witchery'. Honestly you Carapaces—"

"Carapacians—"

"Bug-folk," she said, winking. "We _all_ have the Four Heroes, it's just us trolls don't see the need to kill frogs on altars to the Witch!" Everyone staggered a little. The religious rivalry between the Carapacian faith and the trollish one was well-documented and quite heated despite the fact that the Three Faiths all ran on the same core set of beliefs. Even Jade looked scandalized. Vriska laughed her ass off. "Dance puppets dance!" she shouted. A Knight cuffed her.

The Dignitary shut his eyes and mouthed counting to ten while grabbing his liege-lord by the color to make sure he didn't maul the Seer and spark an international incident. "My lord Regent," he said. "You cannot allow this violation of justice. The princess of course has a right to choose her mate, but I'm afraid a treaty was signed." He produced a document written on yellow paper. He read aloud in a soothing yet businesslike tone. "The princess of Derse will travel to Prospit three months before her wedding. She will be accompanied by fifteen suitors, and the princess of Prospit must choose a husband by the time of her royal brother's wedding." He rolled up the paper. "It's ironclad."

"No it isn't," interrupted Terezi, waving her cane in the air to draw attention to herself. "The exact words are that she must choose a husband. Not that she has to choose one of your suitors."

The Dignitary growled. "It is _implicit_—"

"But not explicit!" said Terezi, wiggling a finger.

The Dignitary smirked. "I have studied Prospitian law Madame Seer. A Royal sibling may only marry a person of nobility—"

Terezi snorted. "No, they may only marry a person of _rank_. A Knight of Prospit counts as a person of rank. Her own father was a page-boy for crying out loud! If someone who had a chance of one day _becoming_ a knight can be Prince-Consort, then certainly a full knight can marry a redundant heiress." She smirked, arms crossed. "I was an advocate's apprentice for most of life before I ascended. You can't beat me sir."

The Dignitary was at a loss for words. Jack Noir screamed in frustration. "Just take his goddamn rank away then! He doesn't fucking deserve to have it!" He shook his vassal. "How hard was that!?" Everyone stood in shocked silence. To strip a Knight of Prospit of his rank was reserved for the most heinous of crimes, and usually done posthumously after the offender's execution. Clearly, things were done differently in Derse. Surely no one would be enough of a degenerate to—

"Alright," said the Regent. The room went silent. "I am going to give you one chance Sir Karkat. Denounce this creature (Vriska blew him a raspberry) and deny any connection whatever to her, and I will allow you to maintain your rank, under a temporary probation. Then if she wishes, the princess may take you as her husband." The Dignitary made as if to protest, but the Regent stopped him. "If you do so, the thief will be executed. However, if you do not denounce her, you will be stripped of your rank and stricken from the records. You will not only cease to be a Knight, but will never have been one at all, yet the thief will be given a chance to live. What say you?"

Well shit, thought Vriska, biting her lip. This was an absolute no brainer. Vriska knew exactly what she would do in this position. Well, living was fun while it lasted, and at least she got to meet John. She decided she wouldn't hold it against Karkat. What was one old friendship against a lifetime of happiness—?

"Fuck you," said Karkat. "Fuck you, fuck your title, fuck knighthood, and fuck your ugly mother."

"Are you going to let him speak to you like that Lord Re—"

"And fuck you most of all Lord Shithead!" Karkat shouted, baring his teeth at the Dignitary. "Fuck you and fuck the trumpet-beast you rode into town on, you overgrown pompous oily slimy filthy degenerate of a nobleman." Turning back to the Regent, he said, "Are you fucking offended? I'm sorry, I thought this was Prospit, the golden city of freedom and equality, but you're too busy trying to _suck Derse's collective dick_ to give a fuck about that." He spat a glob of reddish saliva right into his eye. "_That_ comes with a free knighthood."

The Regent roared, descending from his chair and striking him across the face with his rod, once, twice, three times. "You are relieved of your duties Karkat Vantas," he shouted. Pointing at Vriska, he said, "Now give her to the Capricorn."

Karkat gasped. "You said—"

"If she can kill it, she goes free. It's a chance, as promised." The iron grating gave way beneath Vriska, and she fell into the depths.

The trolls' name for themselves as a people evolved entirely independently of the same human word. It had a completely different linguistic origin and etymology and meaning. It descends from the Old High Trollish for 'person'. It's said that before the first contact, humans had stories about trolls, or rather creatures they called trolls. They were brutish monstrosities that walked on their knuckles like apes, child-eaters of Herculean strength, laughing tricksters possessing profane magicks, dressed in the skins of animals and the skulls of their enemies. There was nothing of this in the true trolls. It was an old story with no truth to it, best left forgotten.

And yet, looking at the grand old Capricorn, Vriska understood why those early humans might have thought what they did. The Capricorn caste, the Subjugulators of old, had all gone insane in antiquity and been cast out of the cities. Even when they'd been accepted in troll society they had been the most feared of all blood colors, for their instability, their baseless cruelty, and their propensity to _never stop growing_. Now they were outcasts, savages living at the fringes of civilization, raiding against both Prospit and Derse and distant New Alternia, capturing innocents to sacrifice to their clown gods in their heathen rituals, working devastating chucklevoodoos with the blood of the slain.

Vriska had heard all of these stories and more. The reality was far worse. She shouldn't have been able to see at all in this light, but her vision eight-fold could sometimes be a curse rather than a blessing. The accounts failed to mention the hideous war paint, the ritual scars, the strange rectangular pupils like a goat's, the paradoxically elegant curvature of the horns, like the arms of a harp, and the sickly sweet stench, like vanilla and sugar trying to mask blood. He was easily twice her size. His time in this pit had clearly done his mental health no good. He giggled.

Vriska did too, not out of any sense of humor, but because the day had degenerated so far that she felt it was either laugh or cry and she'd be damned if she ever cried in front of anyone, even a creature that was more animal than troll. His laugh was almost sane, almost civilized—

He suddenly cocked his head like a dog that had heard a noise, and bellowed. It was something like a roar combined with the braying of a goat, amplified by a factor of ten and filtered through something completely insane. Vriska grabbed for anything nearby and fixed her fingers on something smooth and round with three holes in it. For an instant she stupidly thought it was a bowling ball, but it was actually a human skull.

Regardless, she hefted it the same way and hurled it into the less-than-troll's gaping mouth. It was a tad too big to make him choke, but he certainly had trouble pulling it out. In the meantime Vriska scrambled up the wall. It was slimy and slick and carried that awful metallic-sweet smell, but the bricks had deep spaces in between them and she found purchase easi—

He rammed the wall where she had been holding onto just seconds ago, with enough force that the skull in his mouth exploded and Vriska was shaken from the wall and onto his back. Grabbing onto his shaggy, greasy hair, she produced her emergency weapon, a razor blade that she had concealed, well, never mind where. She brought it to his neck and readied to rake it across his throat, when he turned and slammed his back into the wall, driving the breath out of her. He slammed again, giggling, and Vriska could swear she'd heard something snap.

She let go of the Capricorn and slid down the slimy, sticky wall, making sure to dig her razor deep into his shoulder and letting it drag down his back as she fell. She'd missed her chance to kill him, she thought as the purple welled up past her fingers, but she'd be damned if she didn't make sure he remembered her.

It seemed to take her forever to finally hit the floor, but it couldn't have taken more than two seconds. Her razor slipped out of her hand as it snagged in the Capricorn's hide, now tearing the flesh rather than neatly cutting. She began to lose consciousness, but felt it wasn't coming quickly enough. He turned and gave her a look that was part glare and part smile, so wide she could see the joint where his lower jaw met his skull, and every single one of his yellow, cracked teeth. His eyes were huge too; the yellow of his sclera was visible all the way around the purple of his irises, like a terrified riding-beast. "You," he muttered, speech so garbled Vriska wondered if she wasn't imagining it, "are gonna be tasty." She blacked out as he reached for her, palming her thin frame easily in one massive hand.

Jade held Karkat's head in her arms, whispering through her tears. "A knight," she said, "isn't something that's made. You are a knight because of what you do, not because the Regent waved his stick at you," she muttered, running her hands through his hair, circling around his horns. It felt good. He wouldn't trade the sensation for anything in the world. Unfortunately, without his rank he was not entitled to anything from the princess. Not a caress, and certainly not marriage. He stood up. If Jade said he was still a knight so long as he acted like one, then by the Sufferer he'd be the most chivalrous motherfucker in the kingdom.

Karkat spied a paladin wearing a heavy war-sickle, a ceremonial piece plated in gold (what else?), carved with Old High Trollish. "Happiness must be earned" it said. Too fucking right.

He tackled the Knight to the ground, pure adrenaline giving him the strength to floor a grand Carapacian, and took the sickle. He turned toward the Regent and gave him an ironic salute, flipped the Dersites the bird, gave Jade a smile, and then dove into the pit.

He took off the Capricorn's head in one strike.

Vriska barely remembered anything from that night. Karkat with some fancy new sickle. Being thrown over somebody's shoulder. Running through the night. The Cathedral Domina Nostrum de Fortuna. The smiling eyes of the priestess. And purple. Purple everywhere. In her hair, on her hands, in her clothes, and on the streets. Fluttering from rooftops and falling from the sky and spraying onto her face and staining a handkerchief. Purple, purple, purple.

"Good morning, daughter," said the priestess as morning light streamed in through the window. No purple anywhere. Excellent.

"Hi," said Vriska, not in the mood for anything more creative. "Did I die last night? I think I might have."

The priestess shook her head. "By the grace of God you are still alive child. He sent you a valiant knight to be your protector. The knight left you in my care, with platinum to provide for you should I need it, and promises to return soon."

Vriska stuck her tongue out at the priestess. "Karkat was already there! God can't take the responsibility!" The priestess gave a shrug, as if to say 'if you insist.' It was the same one from before, Vriska realized. Looking at her more closely, she could see that the priestess was a Scorpio, just like her, with vision eight-fold and blue lips and blue lashes and the same protruding fangs paired with otherwise normal teeth. She seemed only a little older, a little healthier and fuller figured. It could have been Vriska herself, if things had been otherwise. The priestess smiled, as if thinking the same thing.

"Who is John? You called his name once or twice." she asked.

Vriska rolled over, staring at the wall. The priestess touched her shoulder and left. A little later she returned with a tray of food; hot bread, sliced cheese, some milk. Vriska devoured it and demanded more. "And some meat if you have any!"

The priestess shook her head sadly. "We are still on the Cathedral grounds my daughter, and the flesh of living beings cannot be imbibed in the Sufferer's holy presence." Vriska grumbled, but didn't complain too much when she was brought another loaf of bread. It was full of seeds and nuts and berries, and was so buttery and flaky that it almost had her in tears with its richness.

Karkat came back at around noon, looking like absolute Hell. Vriska couldn't help but feel mildly responsible. "Oh, you think?" he snarled. "Doesn't matter now," he said, plopping down on a chair.

Vriska shrugged. "I'm sorry."

Karkat seemed to only get more upset. "Oh, you're sorry? Well that absolutely makes up for the fact that you lost me a knighthood and my chance with Jade."

"I recall," Vriska announced, "that you _renounced_ your knighthood."

Karkat's eye twitched. "Only because you put me in that position, _Serket_."

Vriska nodded. "Okay, I'll give you that. But," she said, pointing for emphasis, "knowing what you know now about the people you worked for, could you live with yourself still being a knight?"

Karkat hissed at her, before spitting out a "No" though grit teeth. Vriska laughed. "Oh Karkles, you pretend not to care about anything but you have all this _integrity_ weighing you down! It's so pathetic."

"I should have let you get eaten by that freak," he said. "I only helped you to impress Jade, fat lot of good that did me."

"Fuck that," said Vriska, flipping her hair. "You care about me."

"I hate you," he said, eyes narrowed. The irises were starting to fill up with red at the edges, Vriska noticed, and felt a hint of disgust. What's more, Karkat's bruises were now a very deep purple, almost black, with hints of green and yellow at the edges, so like a _human_.

She smiled. "Me too."

He leaned back in his chair, banging his head against the wall. "Fuck," he said, grinning slightly. "Now what?"

Someone walked into the room just then and Vriska's jaw nearly hit the floor. John. She almost got up, but he motioned for her to stay in bed, pulling up a chair. "How are you doing?" he asked.

"Pretty good, considering," she said. Or rather began to say, before she was taken over by a coughing fit. He held her head, put his face very close to hers, and _breathed_ into her. It felt hot and cold at the same time, and filled Vriska with a strange giddiness. Everything that had hurt before became more uncomfortably warm than anything. She looked at him confusedly. He smiled. "Direct descent from the Four. The Crockers are in charge for a reason." Absentmindedly he brushed aside a strand of her hair from her forehead. Realizing what he was doing, John pulled back as if he'd touched a hot stove, blushing fiercely.

Karkat groaned. "Is this what you two are going to be like together? So fucking awkward all the damn time?"

John turned, welcoming the distraction. "Hey Karkat!"

"'Sup," he answered with a lazy wave. "Why're you here, other than to moon over my semi-kismesis?"

"Your what now?" he said, scratching the back of his head. "I'm sorry, you trolls have such confusing familial relationships or whatever they are." Karkat slapped his forehead, then shouted in pain.

John and Vriska both chuckled at him. "I came to tell you guys something," he said, looking excited. "Last night after you left, Jade threw a huge fit. She made all the suitors meet up in front of the palace gates, and made a huge announcement. She will marry whichever man manages to bring her the rarest treasure by the time of my wedding."

Karkat made a jerking-off motion. Vriska was embarrassed for him. "So? Regardless of what she wants, I'm not a knight anymore. Not officially at least."

John shook his head patronizingly. "Karkat, I also made an announcement. Whoever succeeds in this task, and anyone who accompanied them, will be made a knight as soon as I come of age as king, the very day of the wedding. You go and find something, then you can come back and get hitched with Jade and live happily ever after and have lots of horrible mutant babies."

Karkat's eyes widened. Vriska cleared her throat. "Okay, good for Karkat. But what about us?"

John looked crestfallen. He had known this would come up, but had tried to bury it under his enthusiasm. "I'm sorry Vriska, I have to marry Rose and there's nothing I can do about that." She glowered, hissing a little. John sat back down. "If you help Karkat, you can be a knight. You'll finally have a good life. You can eat your fill and go into the palace whenever you want. Even if we can't….be together, we can still see each other every day. It's not ideal but, well, nothing is."

Vriska nodded and fell back onto her pillow, feeling suddenly exhausted. Was it the weight of what John had just told her, or his strange magic wearing off? Maybe both. Well, being a Knight of Prospit and a possible king's mistress (though something told her John was 'above' extramarital activities) was certainly better than she's had any right to hope for. "The problem is though," she said, suddenly fierce. "This is all speculation for the future that might not even come about, because what the fuck are we going to bring?"

There was a soft cough from the doorway. The priestess had returned—or had she been there all the time? John rose and offered a slight bow, calling her 'mother'. "Be at peace, your grace," she said, striding forward. She was holding a box of that same green stone they'd used to make the Sufferer in the Cathedral proper, and was carved with the horrific image of an Angel. She handed it to Karkat. Inside was a map.

Author's note: A little troll headcanon in this chapter, hope you don't mind. The Capricorn in the pit isn't supposed to be anyone in particular, but I was trying to invoke Mindfang vs. the Grand Highblood. And of course they use platinum for money, seems silly in a city full of gold to care about that metal. Much.  
If you think the romance feels a bit rushed, well, this is a fairy tale.


	3. Many Journeys Begin (And One Ends)

John left very quickly, having various princely duties to attend. "I've already seen the map," he said. "Good luck, both of you." He hesitated a moment, and wrapped Vriska in a warm embrace that ended far too quickly for both of them.

The map was a strange one. Written in Middle Trollish, it depicted Prospit and Derse as gigantic in proportion to the other locations on the map, as well as various mythical creatures roaming the countryside, vast streaks of color in the middle of the Painted Desert that would be miles wide if they were real and little serifs for documented wind currents. It tried to depict the stars as well, forcing the ground to curve away oddly, creating a much distorted view of the world. While Karkat did not doubt its authenticity, he was unsure as to the map's usefulness as, well, a map. "This is not cartographically accurate," he said, very slowly and deliberately, because he had other things he'd wanted to say, but he would not be rude to the priestess.

Vriska snatched it out of his hand. "This is amazing," she shouted. "It's a real pirate map!"

"You're still into pirates?" Karkat sneered. "I thought you'd have grown out of it by now."

Vriska ignored him and pointed at the signature. "Spineret Mindfang, third of that name, the Marquise of Lomat. She was such a total badass! This is her treasure Karkat!" She traced a line with her fingertip from the isles of Lomat in the North Sea to a rocky crag near a small city on the Bright Coast, at the exact midpoint of Prospit and Derse, at least according to the wonky perspective. "Hellllllll yes, anything she had hidden must be worth at least three dowdy princesses."

"Wait, you can read Middle Trollish?" asked Karkat, obviously not buying it. "And Jade is not dowdy!"

Vriska rolled her eyes. "Of course, any idiot should be able to read Middle Trollish. It's just Early Modern Trollish with really awkward passive constructions and the prefix 'MEKHAY' instead of the suffix 'AYI' and 'DEHFEH' for 'THES' at the beginning of words and random 'HTEM's scattered around for no real reason, combined with spellings from Plats-Trollischer and several Derse-Carapatian loanwords."

Karkat gave a stiff half-nod to acknowledge that he had, in fact, heard her say words, but not that he had understood any of them. She glared at him. "Is it so hard to believe I'm literate?"

The priestess took the opportunity to cut in. "She's right you know; this is the Marquise's map. She was my ancestor. I never had the courage to undertake the journey myself. Despite the rather artistic approach to the rendering, I can assure you that the calculations of distance and longitude and such like are completely accurate. I will gladly give you this map, on one condition."

Vriska moaned just as Karkat readily accepted it. "It is a selfish request, admittedly," she said, looking embarrassed. "I only wish to see my ancestor's treasure once, before you present it to the princess." Vriska sighed in relief.

Karkat looked at the map. There was something disconcerting about their destination. "That's an angel," he said, pointing at the winged creature flying over the city. The head of a human, with wings like a cherub and the tail of a dragon. Not nice creatures by any means. Vriska looked at it. "The City of Wrath," she said, reading the epithet. "Beneath the nesting ground of Angels lies the Grotto of Despair, where my treasure is hidden."

She and Karkat looked at each other grimly. "This is going to be incredibly dangerous," he said, with a look of fierce determination.

Vriska gave a trite nod. "I love it!"

They set out from the Cathedral shortly after. The legitimate suitors were all going to depart the day after tomorrow, so Karkat and Vriska were determined to get a head start, which meant preparing for the journey today. "We're going to need to steal another magic rope—"

Karkat shook his head, producing the rope. "I picked it up on my way out yesterday and forgot to tell you."

Vriska snatched it out of his hands with a delighted grin. "_Yessssssss_, now we just need to steal—"

Karkat grabbed Vriska by the shoulders and shook her. "No dammit, we don't need to steal anything!" Apparently, Karkat had money. The Knights are paid only middling wages, but there were so many strictures and restrictions that he'd had almost no choice but to be miserly. "No gambling, no booze, no women until we've been in for ten years, no ostentatious clothing, and we have to sleep at the barracks four days a week so there was really no point in getting my own place, and we weren't allowed to personalize our spaces _in_ the barracks so basically I have a mountain of useless platinum collecting dust at the bank."

"Wow," said Vriska, rubbing her chin. "You are a stingy fucker."

"Did you not even _hear_ what I just said?"

After withdrawing all of his money, Vriska convinced him to split it two ways, and ran off. Karkat was half-certain that he'd never see her again, but still ended up buying a pair of riding-beasts and enough supplies for two people. Vriska did in fact return while he was negotiating the price of a tent. "Just getting one? I hope you understand that you're sleeping under the stars then." She was now wearing a leather outfit with a spider web pattern, short enough that he could see her knee-length red boots. She wore matching red gloves as well.

"Fuck off," he said. "You look like a hooker."

"An expensive one, I hope; the dress alone cost me fifty platinum," she said, flipping her long hair so it smacked him in the face. "And you're not one to make fun of my outfit. What is your deal? Maybe they only put in that rule about ostentation because of _you_."

Karkat had gotten himself some new clothes, since all of his old ones were still at the barracks and his uniform was far beyond ruined. At first he'd just wanted to get some serviceable traveling clothes, but then he had decided that money was for spending, dammit. He was out of the knights and could finally afford to treat himself. He bought a thickly padded arming jacket embroidered with the sign of the Signless, a coat of light mail, a lovingly crafted bracer of black leather, an extravagant red cape that clasped with a large silver Cancer symbol, a sword-belt for his new war-sickle, and a fine black hat. It had been sized for a human, so he'd had to poke holes in it for his horns. "I look nice! I look like a well-off young adventurer who shouldn't stand out too much in any given crowd, while _you_ look like you charge a hundred platinum an hour to whip people and call them bad."

"Well seeing as you already paid me," said Vriska, smacking his behind hard enough that he jumped. "Do you want the rest of it now or later?"

"This is dumb," said Karkat, coloring as he inched away from her. "Did you buy anything useful or did you just spend all my money on crap?"

Vriska had also acquired a steel buckler and a huge boating knife with a wicked looking notch in the blade. "And did you know that they sell razor blades by the pound?"

Karkat raised an eyebrow. "What? Who?"

"Certain circles Karkat," she said, affecting an air of exclusivity, "circles that you as a knight are not privy to."

"Where are you keeping—?"

"On my person," she interrupted. "Now, which of these monsters is mine?" She asked, pointing at the riding-beasts.

Karkat pointed at one of the riding-beasts, a white female with a heart-shaped birthmark on her hindquarters. "Maplehoof. She's incredibly gentle, perfect for a new rider."

Vriska jumped on gallantly, flicked the reins—

And was tossed off in one fell bucking motion as Karkat grinned evilly.

The bust of King Daniel I had a stern, fatherly look. He'd been handsome in a sort of classical way, with proud angular features and an aquiline nose like some Emperor of the pre-Derse human kingdoms. At least that's what Eridan managed to make out as it sailed across the courtyard intent on taking off his head, leaping out of its way. As it exploded against the wall, he shouldered his rifle and fired, missing Equius by a hair. The bullet left a fist-sized crater in the opposite wall. "Give me a minute," he said, cranking the handle, "these bloody things take a whole minute to—"

Dave dove off the roof, cloak billowing heroically behind him, swinging his glittering silver sword in a deadly arc for Eridan's head. He quickly blocked the stroke with his rifle and lunged for the knight with his bayonet, still cranking with his other hand. Dave parried each blow easily, almost as if he were bored.

When the rifle clicked, fully reloaded, Eridan took a step back and pulled the trigger only for both of them to be knocked to floor by a wave of moving earth. Eridan looked to the left; Equius had launched a vicious hammer blow at the ground, and was now hefting a statue of the Great Knight almost as big as he was. "Alliance?" asked Dave. Eridan nodded.

Equius hurled the statue as if her were a javelin and Dave jumped on top, easily bisecting the thing before leaping for the troll. Eridan meanwhile flanked Equius and opened fire, only for the larger troll to offhandedly smack the bullet out of the way. It skipped along the ground like a stone over water, leaving an ugly rut in the neatly trimmed lawn before cutting an odd wedge-shaped hole in a nearby pillar. Dave went in low, going for the knees, and was punted across the courtyard for his troubles. Thinking quickly, Eridan threw his cape over Equius's face and tried to stab him in the chest, only to be shoved aside by Dave.

"I changed sides," he explained, shifting the grip on his greatsword. Now he had one hand on the pommel and another on the arm of the crossguard, giving himself increased reach and leverage. At least that's what Eridan assumed when Dave swatted his rifle out of his hands, shouting "fore!"

Equius smacked him to the ground and picked him up. "I didn't," he explained, and smashed Dave into Eridan. He then picked up both Eridan's rifle and Dave's sword, aimed them at their respective owners, and—

The Dignitary cleared his throat, emerging into the thoroughly ruined courtyard. "Why are the lot of you still here? The other suitors are out preparing for their journeys as we speak."

Equius dropped his weapons as the other two stood up and dusted themselves off. "I don't wanna get married," said Dave. "Too many pretty girls in the world to settle on one."

"Nor I," said Equius. "I, well…"

"He's in love with his maid back home," said Eridan tactlessly. "And I, meanwhile, have simply come to terms with the fact that no one will ever love me."

The Dignitary smacked his forehead. "Are you dense? If you bring the princess her gift—"

Dave whistled at him like a dog. "He's too conceited to settle for an arranged marriage. He wants his wife to love him with the unconditional devotion that pilgrims to the Sufferer's hatching place can only dream of."

"Fuck you, Dave," he snarled.

"Girls even think you're good looking," said Dave without changing tone at all. "It's the way you carry yourself that keeps them from liking you. Like everything else is something you had to scrape off your shoe."

"I don't act like that—"

"But you always have your nose all scrunched up like you're smelling something nasty—"

"Is this why you three were fighting?" asked the Dignitary, trying to refocus the conversation. "Arguing over who can maintain the haughtiest attitude?"

Equius shook his head while the other two continued to argue. "We were just entertaining ourselves."

The Dignitary's face surged with anger before he managed to calm himself. "I'm sure the Prospitians will not appreciate this, and tensions are already rising between our parties. Perhaps you could try to socialize with your future brother-in-law? Ease some of the tension by extending the olive branch?"

Eridan sniffed. "That's not really an option. He's off making love to our foster sister or some such—"

Dave interrupted him while Equius fumbled for a towel. "Okay first of all you know I'm not comfortable with you calling her that and you know the reasons why. Mostly because you're always trying to black-flirt with her or whatever the fuck you call it. Second of all, you just put an image in my head that I really don't approve of and I'm afraid I'ma have to beat your ass for real this time."

"Yes," Eridan continued, loudly, "really resealing the bonds between our two nations if you catch my drift—"

Dave took a lazy swing at Eridan's throat, which the Dignitary blocked with his cane, finally losing his cool just a bit, and snarling. "I know that this is how you have fun at home, but perhaps you could do something more….Prospitian to enjoy yourselves?"

Eridan backed away from Dave and asked, "And what would fine gentleman of quality such as ourselves get up to in this city?"

"Gentlemen of quality?" asked Dave with a raised eyebrow. "Don't the girls back home call you a handsy lout? The guys too now I think about it. I know you trolls don't discriminate."

"That was just the one time—"

The Dignitary growled. "They go out drinking, so just leave here before you destroy more of the palace!"

Equius nodded and, before they could launch another argument, picked up his foster brothers by the scruffs of their necks, walking away.

The door to the tavern opened and the room went silent as three ominous figures in purple stepped inside accompanied by a chill wind that must surely have stalked them from the frozen wastes at the Earth's end. The princes of Derse strode into the center of the room, assuming the lordly mien of conquerors rather than guests. In the center was one with the face of a ghost and eyes like death, a shining greatsword in his hand with a golden pommel, likely stolen from some Prospitian lord on the battlefield. He was flanked on one side by a grim-faced giant among trolls, scarred and battered by countless battles, and on the other by a haughty sea-dweller, shark-like teeth bared in sneer, glasses coldly throwing back the light of the room and obscuring his eyes. He held a rifle, most prized of weapons, muzzle to the ground as if it were a common cane. The ghostly figure in the lead opened his mouth, and spoke, voice as cold and mechanical as the heart of Derse. "Where the troll women at?"

As soon as they were able, Karkat and Vriska set out from the main gates under the watchful gaze of the Four. They could not help but marvel at the heroes. On beast-back, they were still dwarfed by the feet of the mythic beings, and their heads were wreathed in mist, sparkling in the morning light like halos. Each was portrayed as an amalgamation of troll, human, cherub, and Carapacian, each adorned with butterfly wings of such delicacy that no terrestrial artisan could have crafted them. There was the Seeress, with suns in her eyes like vision fourteen-fold, the Knight with his sword of fire and his armor of clockwork, the Witch with her dress cut from night, holding a frog in her delicately articulated fingers, and the Heir, with his smiling eyes, called the laughing god by the beast-men. No one was entirely sure of what or who the Four were; each of the Three Faiths interpreting them in some different way, but they agreed that the Four represented some fundamental, benevolent force in the universe.

But soon, the pair was out of the shadow of the giants. They rode in relative silence through the outskirts of Prospit, consisting of small townships and irrigated manors, mostly composed of clay and painted yellow, surrounded by lemon orchards. Occasionally these would be guarded by chained lusii, and the two tried not to gawk at their enigmatic forms, each creature completely unique except for its coloring; impossibly white. Prospit had not been built with these creatures in mind, and most trolls with larger lusii lived here in the countryside for convenience sake. Vriska saw a gargantuan spider as large as the Seeress' bare foot, and tried not to shiver. Such a creature could easily have claimed her as its ward, and then where would she be?

There was much more greenness around than either of them had ever seen in their lives, having never left the city, and they wanted to enjoy it. The fruits were in blossom and the air was abuzz with bees. Vriska rode up to a lemon branch hanging low over a clay wall and snapped it off, bruising the stiff leaves to enjoy the sharp scent. Soon it was pleasantly warm. As far as adventures went it was quite dull, thought Vriska. Maybe they'd meet some sand pirates out in the desert. She threw her branch at Karkat, having grown bored with it. "Ow," he shouted, "that shit has thorns!"

Ignoring him, she said, "Hey, let's race!"

"Race? You can barely ride—"

She ignored him and shouted "hiyah!"while digging her heels into the sides of her mount, which promptly did nothing but turn her head to glare at Vriska, flicking her ears in annoyance. "Riding beasts aren't horses," Karkat taunted, riding around her in a circle to demonstrate his skill, his beast's footpads clicking lightly on the yellow paving stones. "Hitting them only gets them annoyed. If you want to go fast, you click your tongue."

She did so, and nearly fell off as the creature accelerated to breakneck speeds. Karkat rode after her, keeping near to make sure she didn't actually die while offering some words of encouragement. "Grab the fucking reins. How are you going to steer on your back like that? Shouting is just enraging poor Maplehoof, stop it before she does something she regrets. Oh I get it, you're actually a circus rider and this is part of your act, pretending to be terrible. It's pretty good but sort of unrealistic; tone it down a notch or twelve and you might resemble someone who doesn't have severe brain damage."

Enraged, Vriska managed to swing herself back up into the saddle and steer Maplehoof towards Karkat, giving him a vicious backhand and stealing his hat, leaving him with a mess of aluminum foil on his head.

Vriska clicked her tongue several times in rapid succession, assuming that it would make Maplehoof run faster. She was actually correct, to her misfortune, because she had no idea how to make her slow down, and soon Karkat and his repeated expletives were fading away into the background. Vriska was adaptable of course, and was soon acclimated to actually riding, if still unable to control her mount properly, and took a minute to watch the scenery go by. The ground began to slope upward and Maplehoof began to slow down until she crested the hill, and stopped.

Up ahead as far as the eye could see, was the glittering expanse of the Painted Desert, an endless sea of sand, streaked in countless colors; red, pink, gold, green, blue, teal, cyan, vermilion, violet, indigo, burnt orange, fuchsia, magenta….

And she was still listing the colors when Karkat finally caught up to her, just as awestruck as she. Though they would never deny the beauty of Prospit, neither had realized until now just how color starved their eyes were. By mutual agreement, both of them rode downhill as quickly as possible, dismounted, and played in the delicious rainbow sand like children.

An hour later, Vriska was still shaking multicolored dust out of her hair, annoyed but happy. Karkat let off a volley of sneezes, exhaling clouds of rainbow powder. He blew his nose into his handkerchief, which was now a psychedelic wad of moisture and strange new colors neither of them had names for. He threw it away in disgust. "I bought that this morning. You just have to turn everything into a competition don't you?"

Vriska flipped her hair at him, releasing another burst of luminescent particles. "You're just jealous that I won." She too began to sneeze until Karkat laughed at her.

Eventually he asked to see the map. She rolled her eyes. "You can't even read it Karkat!" Vriska pulled it out of her saddlebags and looked at the course she'd lazily plotted this morning. Northeast from the city until they reached the Hatchery, then they'd follow a stream due north until they reached the Bright Coast. Far ahead, she could make out a low domed building of green stone, surrounded by trees. "We're going the right way."

It took them the better part of the day to reach the Hatchery. Vriska had underestimated the distance due to the relative flatness of the desert. The sun was high in the sky now, and beating them down without mercy. Vriska was regretting not buying a hat. Both of them were regretting buying so much black. The wind had kicked up, and at first they were relieved to finally have a breeze, but eventually the little puffs of sand started getting higher and higher, becoming low waves, and soon they were slogging through something that was not quite serious enough to be a sandstorm, though the tiny particles stung all the same. What's more the shifting walls of color were very uncomfortable to look at, changing shades so often that it hurt their color-starved eyes until they were wishing for the comfortingly constant yellow. By the time they arrived, both were very sandblasted, and mildly delusional.

"I am the lord thy God," said Karkat as a handful of the Dolorosas made their stately way from the building, helping him dismount and taking his riding beast to the stable.

"I can fly!" shouted Vriska, performing an elegant swan dive off her saddle. The Dolorosas in their black and green gowns watched with concern as she tried to swim her way across the sand.

The Abbess sighed. "First time in the desert. Let's get these two cleaned up."

Some time later after the pair of them had been thoroughly scrubbed and rehydrated, they met her again for a light meal of fruits and honey. Vriska once again muttered about the lack of meat. The Abbess was a tall, stately woman with short, feathery hair, whose jade colored eyes glowed like lamps. She clicked her tongue at Vriska. "You were always such a carnivore. I swear one of your ancestors must have been a crocodile."

Vriska raised her eyebrow. "Huh?"

The Abbess shook her head. "We remember all our children, Vriska Serket. Frankly I never would have dreamed to meet you and Karkat Vantas again, especially not on a pilgrimage together. What kind of wiggler would you like?"

Karkat blinked. "Huh?"

"Mixed-caste couples tend to get one that's between them on the spectrum," the Abbess explained. "So let's say olive?"

Karkat squinted at her. "I'm sorry, I don't think I was being clear," he said. "Let me rephrase that. Huh?"

She seemed confused. "You're not in a moirallegiance?" It had become a habit since the opening of Prospit for trolls who lived in the city, almost exclusively moirallegiances, to adopt wigglers in something approaching a human family, finding that lifestyle more suited to city life amongst less violent peoples. Both of them had in fact, been brought up this way, overseen in large part by a troll named Rufioh.

Vriska gagged exaggeratedly. "Noooooooo! Spades _all_ the way."

"That makes much more sense," said the Abbess, who seemed relieved of all things. "I doubt either of you would be much good at calming the other down, and I shudder to think what you would do to a child."

"Hey," snapped Karkat, "I am a goddamn emotional rock. I would be amazing as the passive partner in a moirallegiance."

'Mind your language, this is a house of God," she said, in a tone that brooked no argument. Karkat muttered an apology. "If you are not here for a wiggler, then why have you come?"

"We're going to the City of Wrath," said Vriska.

The Abbess gasped. With a melancholy look, she said, "it was wonderful seeing you both again," she stroked their foreheads. "You will be in our prayers."

Vriska smirked, pulling back slightly. "Is it really _that_ bad?"

The Abbess cupped her chin almost forcefully, and sighed. "Yes."

They were given rooms at the Hatchery, cramped little cells of green stone. Vriska found that she couldn't sleep; it seemed religious people were even worse off than the poor, because even the stones of Prospit were softer than the cot she'd been assigned. She looked out the window to see the desert bathed in the light of the rose-moon, a hundred-billion shades of pink. The effect reminded her of a pile of raw meat, in various states of decay. She quickly developed a headache, and left her cell.

Vriska wandered a while, practicing her sneaking. She avoided places illuminated by the moonlight, and steered clear of the Dolorosas wherever she found them, taking pride in her skill. Eventually and entirely by accident, she found her way into the birthing chamber.

The Mother Grub took up most of the length of the chamber, curled slightly in her slumber. Vriska was not entirely sure what to make of the creature. She'd seem a virgin Mother Grub once, pure white with a moth-like body, but this one was very dark grey, and had stretched out something like a termite queen. There were only little scraps remaining of those glorious wings; presumably she'd eaten them to help facilitate her first brooding period eons ago. Her face had a certain ethereal beauty, but it was very difficult to reconcile with the massive insectoid body. For once she found herself agreeing with the human notion that troll reproduction was weird. While they had a loving, caring creature that had undergone many of the same experiences they will one day have, trolls got a completely alien, nonsentient yet somehow semi-divine being that watched over their squabbles with pronounced disinterest. Vriska stepped into the chamber, and only then noticed that Karkat was there as well, kneeling on the floor.

"You didn't strike me as particularly religious," she announced. He jumped.

Glaring at Vriska, he answered. "Well it's not as if I was some kind of warrior monk for a significant portion of my life or anything." Vriska shrugged and sat down next to him. "What do you want?"

"I couldn't sleep," she said. "My bed is uncomfortable and the moon is making everything outside look like your insides; pink and abnormal and gross. Hey, try to convert me so I can fall asleep!"

Karkat squeezed the bridge of his nose. "I'm not actually that religious, but I just wanted to pay my respects. Is that so wrong?"

Vriska yawned. "Mmmhmm."

"Fuck you, et cetera." He turned his attention to the massive creature that had given birth to him. She kicked one of her long spiky legs in her sleep. It would have been cute if not for the fact that she could disembowel him with those things. "Remember that one summer I told everyone the Sufferer was my ancestor?"

Vriska nodded. "And I believed you and went out preaching your gospel of 'fuck everyone everywhere'. Then Rufioh got mad and washed our mouths out with soap, and you cut out your nonsense."

Karkat chuckled half-heartedly. "You see, some Dolorosa told me that at church once. And being a dumb kid I believed her. I didn't learn until that summer that it was just something they tell mutant kids to make them feel better about themselves, like when they tell human foundlings that God is their father or some shit." He rubbed his arm nervously. "I guess it just makes me feel like I actually belong—"

Vriska yawned even more loudly, stretching her arms out and falling back, resting her head on her hands. "Good night Karkat."

Karkat glared at her for a long while, fuming. Just as he decided to resume his meditation, her left eye snapped open, all seven pupils zeroing in on him. "I never stopped believing you, you know."

Karkat shouted and the Mother Grub stirred, releasing a sound something like purring. "Vriska I am not in the mood right now—"

"No seriously," she said, smiling. "You look _exactly_ like him, nubby horns and all. When was he around, two thousand years ago? I'm pretty sure any wigglers he might have had would've been hatched this century."

Karkat laughed at her ridiculousness. She couldn't think he was that stupid. She looked sincere enough, but he'd already learned she was a good actress. "Fine, don't believe me," she sniffed and shut her eye again.

Dave awoke to the sound of ticking the next morning in an unfamiliar room feeling as if Equius had been tap-dancing on his head. The room appeared to be made out of hundreds of interlocking pieces of metal, each moving in tandem towards some unknowable goal. Soft red light was streaming in through the window on the opposite end of the room from his bed. He stood, looking out the window, to behold a gargantuan structure of spinning black metal rising out of a lake of fire, the entire thing a single mechanism upon which someone had had the bright idea to build a settlement. Little red things slithered hither and thither, ducking in and around the gigantic pieces of the mechanism as if they had memorized its patterns so perfectly that they knew they had nothing to fear. "Shit," he said. "I've died and gone to Hell." Off in the distance, similar, though much, much smaller hellish engines spun their machinations, connected to the center of Pandemonium with great steel bridges. One of them gave a sudden great lurch and the entire neighborhood shifted several hundred feet. He realized Hell was a gigantic clock.

Eridan burst through the door looking excited. "Dave you're up!"

"And that just confirms my theory," Dave noted.

"Huh? Wait, who cares. C'mon, we're going!"

"Where? Heaven? Good move, I don't think I like Hell much. Too bright," he said, shielding his eyes.

Eridan gawked at him. "Are you kidding me? You don't remember last night at all? We're in Lohac!"

A series of fuzzy images came to Dave's mind. Eridan getting slapped by every sentient being in the tavern, including Dave, and clearly enjoying it. Equius shacking up with a pair of identical bluebloods. And Dave himself talking to a lovely Libra in red for a length of time.

"What is best in life?" she'd asked, suppressing a giggle.

Dave had taken a drink. "I don't know. Whatever this is I guess." The troll frowned. And then she'd ordered him another.

"You expected me to say something like 'to see my enemies driven before me and hear the lamentations of their women'? We're warriors not barbarians," he said, belching loudly. "We like the finer things in life. Like this thing. Does this have apples in it? I love apples."

The Libra had nodded. "I guess that makes sense, though I kinda still wish you were some noble savage type. So, what do you do?"

"I'm captain of the Knights of Derse." He drained his cup. She filled it again.

"You seem pretty young. How did you manage it?"

"I killed the previous captain."

"Badass."

She had kept questioning him, always friendly and just a little mocking to keep him on his toes, filling his cup as soon as it was empty. Somehow, he'd started talking about his father. He and Rose had been born right after the war with New Alternia, which Derse had lost. In the settlement there had been an exchange of hostages, the youngest son in exchange for some high-blood or other. A cruel joke; the Empress would send someone to sit on the throne some day, and a Dersite prince would go live in her palace for the time it took him to drown. In a very un-Derselike display of compassion, Dave's older brother had volunteered himself, insisting that Dave's existence be kept a secret.

Dave had told the troll girl in a drunken stupor that his own children would not go unacknowledged.

"How is that going to happen if you don't get married?"

That fucking devil woman had tricked him into accepting the quest.

A little later, Dave and Eridan made their way through the marketplace, dodging the thrusting pistons and grinding gears, and of course, the crocodiles. The diminutive reptiles alone of all the beast-men had kept their independence from either Prospit or Derse, all because of their diabolical homeland. In large part it was because of the city's unassailability. On the other hand, their resistance to the heat of the lava allowed them to dredge the lake of fire for its valuables, bringing up hoards of gems and buckets of molten gold. Despite the fact that the creatures could barely count to four, Lohac was one of the wealthiest nations on the planet.

"It's not even fucking fair," Eridan muttered, glancing at a pair of lizards nakking their little hearts out and taking a huge swig of water. Dave rolled his eyes. The troll drank like….a fish.

By the time they met up with Equius, Dave was drenched in sweat and Eridan was half-dead. "How did you even get as far as the hotel man?" Dave asked. "Come to think of it, is this really just the next day? How did we get here so fast?" Eridan shrugged.

"I believe I can answer that," said Equius. Surprisingly enough his sweat level was about normal. Dave had thought the big troll would have melted by now. Instead, he had his arms around the two identical blue-blooded girls from the previous (?) night. They were wearing metallic colored makeup and silver powder in their hair, marking them as prostitutes. Dave was unsure if he should tell him or not. "We flew on dragon-back."

Dave considered this for a while. "We must have hit the bottle harder than I thought," he concluded.

Equius shook his head. "It's true! Your companion from last night gave us a ride on her lusus, as well as this." One of the girls produced a sheaf of papers, handing one to Dave, one to Equius, and one to Eridan. Maps. Dave sighed. At least he knew where to look for Jade's fabulous present that he was suddenly intent on giving.

It was a common slur that Dersites were ghosts. Well, all stereotypes have some basis in reality. Rose was certainly pretty, thought John, but he'd be damned if she wasn't the whitest creature on Earth. Her hair was like silver, her skin nearly translucent, and her lilac eyes could probably be seen for miles around. "Good evening John. It's nice to meet you."

"Likewise. You wanna go outside or something?" he said with his most charming smile.

"I'd rather not," she said with a frown.

"I'm sure." The first day, he had played her his harpsichord. To his surprise, she asked to accompany him on her violin. He was excited at the prospect, but she just didn't seem to be able to follow. It's not that she lacked skill, but it was like there was some deep melancholy in the way she played that simply did not mesh with his own method. Well, at least she appreciated music.

A thought occurred. "Maybe you should lead," he said. She nodded, as if she had expected it, and began to play a mournful dirge. He followed along, letting the sadness into him for the duration of the song.

She suddenly stopped. "It seems you can find the beauty in sadness. To be honest I was hoping you'd be as unable to play my song as I was unable to play yours."

John shrugged with a reassuring smile. "Music is music. And you weren't that bad!" He thought a moment. "Maybe the music is just different in Derse. You could study some Prospitian tunes; that might help."

Rose shook her head, snickering. "That was a piece of my own composition. Real Dersite music is very lively John, and not nearly as complex as yours. It's all about being able to jump in at any point in the song because it could be your last. Marching songs, drinking songs, fighting songs—oh Lord the fighting songs."

John scratched his head. "Do you mean….songs you sing _while_ fighting?"

Rose nodded. "My foster-brothers really enjoy those, particularly since they're always sparring." They talked about their music and their families long into the night.

John was unsure he could ever love his future bride, but he decided that he could certainly like her. On the second day, he took her to the organ room. The instrument had been built into the palace, its hundred pipes snaking around the huge two-storey chamber, connecting every corner of the room to the gargantuan console up on a balcony, like the arteries connecting the heart to every part of the body. Rose thought the pipes were made of brass but John assured her that they were purest gold. "And the keys are all red-gold for black and white-gold for white, with blue-gold for the pedals."

"You don't expect me to believe that?" Rose asked, shaking her head. "There were marvels of iron and amethyst in Derse, of course, but all but a few of them were sold off or repurposed centuries ago. How could anyone have resisted melting this whole thing down for so long?"

John shrugged. "We're a younger kingdom than yours. Maybe we're just saving it for some hard times."

Rose sighed at his naiveté. "There just can't be that much gold in this city!"

John nodded. "And what's Derse built from again?"

"Purple marble, the very compliment to your yellow," she said. "We have a great deal of amethyst as well, but we don't build with it! We have a few busts at most—"

"I don't believe it," John said. "There's no such stone as purple marble, and no gem could be big enough to carve even a bust."

Rose blinked. Clearly, the rumors he'd heard about Derse were true; they thought he was an idiot. "And if it was real gold," she said, ignoring him, "wouldn't it be damaged by the heat of the furnace?"

John laughed. "Yeah, if it used a furnace." There was a large slot underneath the console, like the end of a very thick pipe. He strode up to it, wiped his hands together and _breathed_ into it. The Heir of legend could bisect a planet with his deific Breath, or so they said. John's little puff of blue was hardly worth anything compared to that, but it could still pressurize an organ for an hour or two. The instrument groaned to life, and he ascended the spiral staircase to the console.

"No, John," Rose said hesitantly, "you can't actually play that monstrosity! It has, what, seven manuals? And how many pi—?"

Rose cut off as the room filled with sound. She didn't understand. This thing was _built_ for him, for every Royal Heir who wielded the Breath. It was a sign of who he was, put there by God or whoever had built this city to inform him that his place was here. Sure, it was a struggle to play; he rarely did so because of how much actual physical effort was required to control so many different sounds. An organ was really dozens of instruments put together; several harpsichords and clavichords, a legion of recorders, an army of clarinets, controlled by a single person at once. You needed both hands, and both feet. Of course, an Heir's duty was not easy. When he was king, he would need to give every part of himself to rule. He wished he could explain it, but he figured he'd just show her.

Of course he could fucking play it.

On the third day Rose finally met Jade. The other girl had been avoiding her since the disastrous admittance of the Dersite party into the city, but John finally cornered her at the firing range. Jade was even better than Eridan, cranking her rifle within seconds and destroying an entire flock of flying targets. Of course, back in Derse they used real birds—

"Why'd you bring her here John?" Jade snapped.

"Because you're being rude," John said in the same flippant manner he said everything. "What happened the other day had nothing to do with her. Circumstances just aligned to show us that the Ascendant Regent is a prick. Rose is no more at fault than Karkat was."

"_Sir_ Karkat!" Jade affirmed, swinging her rifle in a wide arc. Rose took a step back. She knew that these were not her foster-brothers, who were liable to burn down half a city when they were 'just fooling around', just as she knew how this conversation would end, but instinct was hard to avoid.

"I never called him Sir though," John said. "Why should I start now?"

"You are showing a complete lack of respect. He's a hero—" John touched the bridge of her glasses and she became cross-eyed. Jade made a choking sound and stepped back. Giggling, she said, "No John, you can't just do something silly and distract me like you always do. What about that girl huh? Don't you even care about what they did to her?" John developed a wistful look.

Ah, yes. Allegedly the disturbance had been the result of a kidnapper trying to seduce John away or some such, and by his reaction that night, he had developed feelings for her. Rose had watched from afar as the royal siblings stormed out of the front gates to make their instantly famous proclamation. John had been a terrible sight, blazing blue light leaking out of him so he seemed wreathed in ghostly fire, clothes moving as if whipped by a gale although there was no wind at all. He had blown the gates open and his voice could be heard across the entire city. And he thought his powers were menial! He was a god among men, and that night he had terrified Rose, even though she had known all the way from Derse that he was a gentle soul.

He poked his sister between the eyes again. "You win this round," she said, giving him a begrudging hug.

"C'mon, we're gonna go start a band."

The harpsichord again; it was probably the only wooden object in the palace aside from Jade's guitar, and even then both were made of some yellow wood. John led them in a stirring rendition of some Dersite song, a chaotic tune that would not have been out of place in a carnival. It was called 'Harlequin' and John was absolutely in love with it. Rose met Jade's eyes and couldn't help but smile. Though an hour ago the girl had hated Rose, with this single exchange of glances she could tell they were now friends. John's true power seemed to be to forge connections between people. In Derse they said that he was a fool, and even here the people muttered that he didn't have it in him to rule. But he would be a great king someday, with much trial and hardship to temper him. She had seen it.

Later, Rose met the palace Seer, Terezi. It was….interesting. "Let's have a Seer off!" the troll had shouted. "Anything you predict, I'll predict better. I'll predict anything better than you!"

Rose sighed. "You see causes, I see effects. A confrontation between us would prove nothing. Also, stop trying to force a musical number."

Terezi pouted. "You're no fun. How do you like the prince?"

Rose shook her head. "He's wonderful. I hate it."

The troll cackled. "What? What's wrong with you?" Dare Rose talk to her? In Derse Seers were bound to confidentiality. Would she go to the royal sibling with her concerns? No, she wouldn't tell, and yes, Rose would dare.

Rose beckoned her into an unused room. It was full of stacked furniture, and everything was coated with a thin film of dust, except for the tea-set full of piping hot Earl Grey, with a pitcher of milk and a bowl of sliced lemons to the side. She rolled her eyes as Terezi sang to herself, "yes I can, yes I can, yes I can!"

Rose hated playing games with other seers. "Please stop, you're going to win."

"Ah," said Terezi, "but there is no fun in simply knowing, I have to _prove_ it!" She sat down and poured their cups. "Lemon or lemon?"

"Let's cut the bullshit Terezi," said Rose, assuming a regal posture on her chair. "We both know exactly how this is going to play out. First you're going to tell me about myself."

Terezi pointed at her and winked. "You're mother is a raging alcoholic because she was engaged to be married to a man who is so fantastically gay that he's gone all the way back around to being masculine and the poor creature actually went ahead and fell in love with the man who could never possibly love her back. You resent her but you also pity her and strive to be her exact opposite, acting cold, ruthless and logical in all things, except of course, for that silly human emotion called love." She adjusted her sunglasses. "Now you get to speak. This next part is too good."

Rose bit her lip. She'd been hoping the troll would just want to overwhelm her with her foreknowledge, but apparently she wanted a show. "Kanaya is the priestess at our chapel. I don't follow the Sufferer of course, and I would constantly get into theological arguments with her because I am a belligerent bitch. I would pick apart her arguments piece by piece and she would dissemble with insubstantial discourses on the nature of faith and love and would always try to work in some really awkward sarcasm and it was adorable and I love her. I told her one day and I thought she would be angry at me for some idiotic reason, but she just kissed me full on the mouth right there in the presence of her god, and I _felt it_." Rose stifled a sob.

Terezi flashed all of her very sharp teeth, leaning back in her chair. "And now you think you're betraying your lady love by liking John at all." Rose barked a laugh. "Huh?" she said, startled.

Rose wiped her eyes and became composed again. "If only it were that simple. Terezi, something horrible is going to happen because of my actions towards that girl. Now, you're going to wave your hand dismissively and make a disparaging remark about my race." In a near perfect imitation of Terezi's voice, she said, "'You humans are so hung up on your sexuality! You should all just get laid, like collectively, as a species,' or some such." Rose squeezed some lemon into her tea and took a sip, calming her nerves. "But you'd only be feigning ignorance of my problem. I knew I would find myself liking John. I think I could have grown to love him, given a few years. But it's happening far too soon for my liking. Something terrible is going to happen to him, and this is just first sign." She downed her tea, wishing it were something stronger.

Terezi made a face. "Boys!" she declared dramatically.

"Men," Rose muttered.

On the first weekend, John insisted on taking her out into the city. Jade had wanted to come, but that would have been a terrible idea. "Actually," Rose had said, "I think I would like to spend some time alone with my future husband." Both of the royal siblings had looked perturbed at the thought. "I'm not that bad, am I John?"

"Not at all," he'd said, looking a bit nervous. "Let's go." Always the gentleman, he'd offered his arm and she took it, and they walked off toward the carriages together. They took a mounted tour of Prospit, and she saw its many glittering marvels. The plan was nearly identical to Derse, down to the number of spires on every shop, but everything here seemed just that much grander. Maybe that really was gold decorating those spires, roofing those buildings, coating those gargoyles. That or really good brass. If Rose had been the one to name the city, she would have called it A Study in Yellow, for every possible shade of it was represented somewhere.

As she marveled at the glorious magnificence of the city, she wondered why it hadn't fallen in beauty like Derse had. Why was nobody trying to exploit this? Was it simply the fact that the people of Prospit were, as a whole, simply more naïve? Perhaps it was the weight of fifteen hundred years of history that made the Dersites cynical, while the young upstart Prospitians could afford their optimism. Maybe for its first few hundred years Derse had been just as grand.

It suddenly hit her. The dwellers in the darkness and their constant whispering. Their absence had become like the buzzing of white noise in her ears, and she had tuned it out. Maybe they had led to the degradation of her city.

"What's it like?" John asked suddenly. "Living on the edge of the world?"

Rose laughed, not knowing what else to do. "What do you think it's like?"

"Well, what could it be?" He took some time to think. "A big huge chasm, maybe. Yeah, you can look down it and see forever. You can see the stars that float along the underside of the world, stars no one but you guys can see. Just an amazing view of what lies beyond the Earth."

"That would be wonderful," Rose smirked. "But it's not like that at all. You don't see what's beyond, because there isn't anything. A formless shadow as far as the eye can see, and the knowledge that this is it, and there is nothing else beyond." Lilac eyes gazed into blue. "The world doesn't end. It just stops."

On sudden impulse, she hugged him. "Thank you John."

"I didn't do any—" He was cut off by a flash of purple light as their carriage exploded.

Author's Note: No, this isn't taking the easy way out. Exploding monarchs just makes everything worse. Am I….Am I evil?  
I really like describing pretty things, or so I discovered writing this chapter. Also developing domed characters.  
The trollish language is basically a bunch of jokes about the development of the English language that only I would find funny. The words that Vriska says in all caps are the names of Daedric letters spelled backwards in proud Homestuck tradition.


	4. Things Get Serious

For nearly a month, Dave travelled south from Lohac on foot. He didn't lack skill in riding, but he just didn't like doing it. After a few days, the sands of the Painted Desert became rocky plains of colored stone. Soon, the heat faded away and he entered the Painted Steppes. He knew that eventually if he kept on in that direction he would reach the mighty River of Dew and Glass, which was the dividing line between all this Technicolor bullshit and normalcy, at least as far as the world went. Past the river, see, lay the Indigo Jungle, under the control of the Beforan Republic, where they'd shipped Eridan in from. And beyond that—well, who knew? The legendary Isle of Erin, where the leprechauns live? The world was a big place, unless of course it ended just after Beforus, which was a distinct possibility.

Dave might like to go that far some day, but for now, he trudged on toward a goal no further than the steppes. If he followed his map correctly, he wouldn't even get close enough to the river to see it. The problem was of course, his map. Eridan and Equius had gotten actual maps; one of them some ancient thing that looked more like a painting than a map and the other a perfectly modern chart of the Painted Desert's fabled air currents. Dave's map seemed to have been drawn in crayon by a blind person.

And suddenly they were upon him; the wild trolls of the Capricorn caste. A dozen of them came over the hill, laughing and screaming and braying like goats, several of them bigger than a bull on its hind legs. A few had bows, one had a rifle. One would assume that the drunken idiot tribe would be laughable at ranged combat, but they were in fact unerring archers. Or at least they had been until they met Sir Dave Strider.

Capes had a bad rap for getting caught on things during important moments, but bloody Hell they were _useful_. They made you a bigger target, true, but very little of that target was actually you. Dave could just swish it around a little and obscure his vital areas until he got close enough that ranged weapons didn't matter. Then he threw his cape over the face of one of the archers, a female wearing floppy shoes and a fake nose, and drove his sword into her stomach, spilling hot purple all over the steppe. Another one wearing motley got off a shot and Dave deflected it with his cape, the purple cloth (growing steadily purpler) wrapping around the arrow and tossing it aside. He loved his cape, he thought, as he closed the distance and separated the troll from his head.

There was a loud *_BANG_* and a fist sized hole appeared in the ground just inches away. Rather than cranking the rifle, the clown-troll simply chuckled and hurled the thing like a spear. Well, that was unexpected, thought Dave, as the bayonet grazed his face, dislodging his shades. Damn; he pretended he only wore them to be cool, but honestly, when albinism runs in the family protective eye-wear is something of a necessity. All the same, Dave had no trouble picking the rifle back up, cranking another shell into place, and shooting the huge skeleton-tattooed female that thought she was sneaking up on him with a club. As she fell down, suddenly headless, something heavy smashed into Dave's chest, nearly knocking him to the ground.

The third and final archer, whose hair had been styled into a glorious rainbow-colored afro some three feet in diameter, had apparently run out of arrows and was now lobbing throwing clubs at Dave. Useful for hunting small game, but not grown men, he thought, as he whipped the heavy projectile back at its owner. It hit the fellow right between the eyes and he fell down with a nasty crack. Damn, Dave hadn't even been trying.

"That's enough!" A very loud female voice that seemed just a bit off; not insane like damn near every Capricorn he'd met, just as if the speaker couldn't control her voice very well. He turned and saw an olive-blood, like Nepeta back home, though this one had much longer hair, and her conservative dress, though quite travel-worn by now, marked her as being from the Beforan Republic. Her tail was swishing along happily behind her. There was a purple-blood standing next to her, with the wildest, shaggiest hair Dave had ever seen, and white tattoos all over his body, depicting his own skeleton. His lips appeared to have been sewn shut. He signed to the olive-blood.

Gesturing at the troll next to her with a bright smile, she shouted, "This is Kurloz Makara, witch-doctor of the Dark Carnival!" And in a very loud whisper, she added "and I'm Meulin, his translator!" In her 'normal' tone, she continued "Surrender, right now—"

"You mean you surrender to me?" Dave stooped to pick up his shades at long last. "Very well, I accept." Chuckles erupted from all around. As a public official he'd learned to always project an aura of control even in situations in which he clearly was not. As a warrior who had fought off dozens of Capricorn raids, he knew you had to be good at bad jokes if you got captured and wanted to live.

Makara was not amused, although his translator giggled when he hesitantly signed his words at her. It occurred to Dave she must be deaf. "No silly, you surrender! The Dark Carnival is only just over the ridge, the entire purple population could be upon you at any second! But Kurloz thinks you're interesting and want to take you to see His Honorable Tyranny, the Grand Highblood!" The other Capricorns practically busted a gut with that one. Well shit. He was being taken to 'trial'. He knew why; he'd killed a couple dozen of them in the past. They had some kind of nickname for him that he couldn't remember.

A thought occurred. Dave produced his stupid crayon map and looked at it. If he was reading it correctly, and there was no guarantee that he was, then that was exactly the place he needed to be. "Lead the way," he said.

* * *

Near sunset. Dave strode into the Dark Carnival as if the insane troll posse were his honor guard rather than his captors. He did not let his disdain for the tent city show on his face. All around there were Capricorn trolls laughing and drinking and committing tiny atrocities to the accolades of their peers and often that of their victims. Every tent was spattered in a multitude of colors as if it were a masterwork of modern art, but there was that cloying metallic-sweet scent everywhere and he realized that all of the colors were the product of troll blood. Slaves, non-Capricorns of all shapes and sizes, bustled about dressed in rainbow-spattered livery, doing anything that might be considered of use. They all seemed very tired and very wary although none of them had a visible mark on them. Meulin was still talking to him, explaining this or that concerning who was whom and what tent provided which service, but he wasn't paying attention, because he noticed as she shook her head around that beneath the dense black curls, there were a pair of hideous ragged scars where her ears should have been. "And if you fuck up, they just kill you," she concluded with a smile. "They don't mistreat the help like some other places."

Someone pressed a drink into his hands and Dave accepted it with indifference. It had a thick foamy head like beer, but didn't have the slightest taste of alcohol. It seemed to be composed of fruit pulp, vanilla, and so much sugar that it made him gag. It wasn't bad per se, but definitely an acquired taste. Still, he drained his cup and asked for another. They respected a man who enjoyed their weird-ass drinks.

Eventually they arrived at the center of the Dark Carnival, a long trail of purple blooded trolls following behind, not so much gawking at the newcomer as grinning in amusement. Here was the largest tent, some two stories in height and completely splattered in colors, a tent reserved for His Tyranny, who the reports said was big enough to fill most of it. In front of it there was a perfectly circular area of earth that had been tamped down to be perfectly flat. In one of her loud whispers, Meulin said, "this ring is the only permanent structure in the whole city!"

Dave nodded as if he had already known this. All around there were other things, exotic entertainments; food stands boasting greasy snacks whose recipes had been looted from all over the world, beast-men and kidnapped lusii in cages (the Capricorns did not believe in lusii for whatever reason and raised their wigglers communally), treasures looted from distant cities, a steam-engine from Beforus that they'd put to use as a self-playing organ. Dave was surprised at the level of complexity. Not that the purple-bloods were less intelligent than other trolls, but he had never known one to be able to keep their attention on something long enough to accomplish anything like _that_.

Kurloz and his party came to an abrupt halt in the center of the ring. The other trolls began to hum in time to the organ, their voices deep and mournful. The bouncy carnival tune that had been playing now seemed like a dirge with the addition of their low rumbling. Once again, Dave was surprised at their organization. Meulin took note of it and looked like she desperately wanted to explain, but just shrugged and joined in the humming.

Just then, the ground began to shake, like the rhythmic pounding of a drum. The humming increased in speed and intensity as the pounding grew louder, until the tent flaps flew open and out stepped four huge trolls, carrying a massive chair made of horned skulls, each smeared with a bloodied smiles, upon which sat—

A gangly troll only a little taller than Dave himself, looking positively tiny on the huge throne, clearly intended for someone five times his size. He was wearing an easy, glazed smile, and was dressed in a purple cape with a ridiculously long hood, and an enormous cod-piece. There was some sort of stylized scowling face drawn on his chest, and on his back was a pair of poorly made butterfly wings in some grotesque mockery of the Four. But what really drew Dave's attention was the sparkling war-hammer in the troll's hand.

There was one productive thing that the Capricorns were known for. Their obsession with colors led many of them to pursue artistic endeavors, and while many of those were horrifying, they'd come up with a process wherein they wrapped objects in a net of gold wire, which they'd then set with a special paste made with a secret mixture of alcohol, troll blood and sand from the Painted Desert. This would then be placed in a furnace of burning magnesium and instantaneously be hardened into something resembling stained glass but harder than diamond. Once, they had been forced to pay tribute to Prospit, and King Daniel I's rainbow-colored war-hammer was the result. It had been lost at the battle of Lohac five years before with the king's death. It seems it had merely returned to its makers.

Well shit, give a girl a long-lost family heirloom and she's almost legally obligated to marry you.

"Well," the troll whispered, "if it isn't the motherfuckin' Hundred-Slayer." His voice was somehow able to carry across the ring. It possessed some sort of insinuating quality, not having to fight against the buzzing throng of the Capricorn horde, but slithering across it. It was perfectly friendly, and perfectly sinister.

"Oh, that's what you guys call me," said Dave, sounding bored. "It's been bugging me all day. Was it really only a hundred? It felt like at least a thousand. You're all so weak I sort of just had to stick my sword out and they just jumped onto it, like 'thank you Mr. Knight I was so tired of being a useless piece of shit and have been looking for a way out. All up ins', or something." Despite the fact that he was making fun of them, a handful of the trolls gave up their humming to snicker at him.

"SHUT." He roared. "THE FUCK." He stood up on his throne. "UP." He hurled a throwing club at one of the laughing trolls, cracking his skull open and spraying a horrific gout of purple onto the multicolored earth. The humming faltered for a second, and then the Highblood laughed, and so did every other troll in the Carnival, tension instantly broken.

"Where'd you get that hammer, bro?" Dave asked.

"You're real bad at listening, hundred-slayer." The Highblood whispered, hefting the hammer to examine it. It flashed a multitude of colors in the sunlight. "Besides, YOU'RE ON MOTHERFUCKIN' TRIAL."

"I plead not guilty by virtue of you guys all being dangerous psychopaths," said Dave, examining his nails.

"THIS AIN'T THAT PART YET MOTHERFUCKER." The Highblood spoke with his entire body, waving his arms, stamping his feet, just generally making a show of himself. A performance. "You like pretending you don't care but I got somethin' that's gonna make you're motherfuckin' sides split," said the Highblood, no longer quite so friendly seeming. "LOOK AROUND YOU HUNDRED-SLAYER AND TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE!" Continuing to feign disinterest, Dave examined the exotic treasures and noticed with a start that there were an inordinate amount of Dersite banners in the mix. Dersite banners, and Dersite amethysts, big pentagonal Dersite coins and Dersite weapons in a big pile. Dave remembered with a start that the rifle from earlier had been a dyed a different shade of purple from the one these trolls used. He ran over to the pile and started sifting through it despite Meulin's protests. The Capricorns laughed at the lapse in his cool façade; he would have to work quite a bit to get back the sliver of respect, but at the moment he didn't care.

"Lookin' for this?" the Highblood whispered. Dave turned sharply. The Highblood was holding a sword up in the air, wiggling it around. It was simple, single-edged, with a long grey blade and a flat, black handle that would have served a kitchen knife better than a sword. If Dave was right—but he couldn't be right—then it was the finest sword in the world. Where had _he_ gotten it from? Gritting his teeth, he said, "That belongs in Derse."

The trolls released such a cacophony of laughter that Dave thought he might go deaf. He fell to his knees and covered his ears, but the Highblood's whispers still found their way in. "DERSE? Ain't no such place no more, brother."

Dave stood up and glared at the Highblood. "DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT!" he roared. "It was like that when we got there. WE JUST CLEANED UP AFTER!" Dave said nothing. "All the surviving Dersites are property of the Dark Carnival bro. YOU STAND ACCUSED OF STEALING YOURSELF FROM YOUR RIGHTFUL OWNERS." The crowd was working itself up into a frenzy of bestial laughter. "How do you motherfuckin' plea?"

Dave knew how these 'trials' worked. Once, when they'd still been a part of the regular trolls, the Capricorns had had an actual role in the legal system, and they'd enforced actual laws and there'd been actual legal precedents and procedures. Now though, it was just plead guilty and die, or plead innocent and fight the Grand Highblood. Dave smirked. "Come at me, bro."

The crowd went silent. Not quite what he'd expected. The Highblood held his arms out in akimbo as if bracing for a hug, if not for the two weapons in his hands and the frightful leer on his face. "CHOOSE YOUR MOTHERFUCKIN' WEAPON BROTHER MAN!"

Dave's father's sword glinted enticingly in the light of the setting sun. The Highblood didn't deserve it. But neither did he. Not yet. "My own sword." Kurloz sent out Meulin with it. She scampered over as fast as she could under its great weight; the point of the scabbard dug a deep furrow behind her. Dave gave slight bow to the olive-blood as he received his weapon, hefting it up onto his shoulder. The crowd 'oohed'.

The Highblood hefted both the war-hammer and the stolen sword, first one then the other, as if trying to decide which. Then he threw both of them to the floor, jumped off his throne, and ran towards the crowd. He wrenched a bow and a quiver of arrows out of somebody's hands and shot Dave in the knee before he had a chance to process what was going on.

Dave fell to his knee, grimacing in pain as he added his red blood to the thirsty Technicolor steppe. Damn, that's why this Highblood was so small. He'd beaten his predecessor through trickery. The Highblood nocked another arrow and stared down its length at Dave. Dave struggled to his feet, pushing himself up with the sword. "Any last words, motherfucker?"

Dave nodded. "You may have taken father's sword and all the wealth of my kingdom, you may even take my life, but I still have something you will never have."

The Highblood fell to cruel, mocking laughter, lowering the bow towards the ground as he struggled to contain himself. "DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I HEAR THAT? Is it your motherfuckin' integrity? YOUR PRIDE? Your honor? YOUR MOTHERFUCKIN' PATRIOTIS—"

Dave snapped the greatsword up and over his head, hurling it with all his strength even as his wounded knee gave out and he fell to the floor. Good thing too; the Highblood managed to raise his bow and loose just as the sword took him through the chest. The arrow would have done the same to Dave.

The crowd stood in shocked silence as Dave struggled to his feet and tried to pull the arrow out. "My piercing wit," Dave announced. The crowd roared. The Highblood burbled as he lay there in a comic pose, propped up by the sword that impaled him as he dribbled out his violet heartsblood. Kurloz and Meulin approached Dave and instructed him to lie still as they dressed his wound.

Then, some others came and hauled him up, and laid him before the throne of bones. They adorned him with brightly colored beads and black paint. They stripped off his clothes and dressed him in new ones before he even had time to protest, and now he was dressed in black and purple, and bore the sign of the stylized face. Through Meulin, Kurloz engaged in an argument with some other trolls in some language Dave didn't understand, and he was given a new cape of deep maroon red. "Apologies Lord Highblood," shouted Meulin, "we don't have any dyes in your exact blood-color. Human blood always turns brown and prickly and gross after you dry it out!" Dave shivered to think that everything he was wearing had been dyed in the blood of some poor troll. But what he said was, "Huh?"

Kurloz laid the war-hammer reverently on Dave's lap as if it were a scepter. He signed to Meulin. "You killed the Highblood! That means you're the Highblood."

"That doesn't make sense. Surely I can't be the first human to ever kill the—"

Kurloz gave a stiff nod. Oh, so Dave had been. Well fuck. Wait. "What was that the old Highblood—"

"Gamzee," they interrupted, "once they have been defeated, they are no longer entitled to their…titles."

"Fine," said Dave with an eye roll. Someone tried to strap on a codpiece and he waved them away. "What did Gamzee say about the survivors of Derse?" Meulin and Kurloz signed to each other animatedly and she sent someone away, once again in some odd language. A few minutes later, Nepeta Leijon and Aradia Megido appeared before him, looking a bit ragged but not as bad as he'd thought. The maid gave an elegant bow; the roguish girl gave Dave a hug. Dave had a felt a sinking feeling in his chest. Was this _everyone_? "Nepeta what the fuck happened?"

* * *

"Nak."

"Don't give me that Willoughby you nook-sniffin' little bitch face!"

"Nak, nak?"

The cannons boomed in response and a geyser of purest blue sand erupted only a few yards off the port bow. Eridan ran astern of the sandship and opened fire on the pirates with his rifle, emptying his magazine at the front guns. A pirate fell overboard and sank into the fine, fine powder below. "Willoughby you cunt turn the fuckin' gun arou—"

There was a deafening boom far too near Eridan's head and one of the pursuing ships exploded in a flash of green. "That leaves four of 'em," he said to Willoughby. The grizzled old crocodile 'nakked'.

* * *

Eridan wound up with the map of air currents. There was a section of the deeper desert where the sand was too fine to walk on with any ease, even for the hump-beasts of the neighboring tribesmen. The air there moved strangely, with the winds always blowing at roughly the same speed in the same directions at the same times of day, like currents in the ocean. Someone had had the bright idea to build ships with multiple pontoons and utilize the wind currents to sail across the sinking sands. Eridan of course had had a choice; ride across the sea of sands on his hippocampus like a chump, or he could procure a ship.

And that little shit of a nakadile Willoughby had convinced him to steal one. "Nak," he said.

"Fuck you," Eridan responded.

* * *

They ran out of powder for the cannon late in the afternoon, and only managed to sink one more ship. Eridan began to feel dehydrated again and went below. They were nearly out of water; a sea-dweller did _not_ belong in the desert, so he filled his bottle from the tank water of his hippocampus. It was a magnificent creature, with pearly green scales and aqua colored fur, not lusus colored; Eridan had had no lusus but Queen Roxanne, God rest her soul. The creature whinnied at him in annoyance. "Piss off, I'm the one who has to drink something you probably shat in," he grumbled as he drank the stuff and nearly gagged. In some cruel irony, Eridan hated the taste of fish.

He took a moment to go through his ammunition stores. They were nearly gone. He'd spent a lot more than he'd thought just stealing the ship, even with Willoughby's help, and the pirates had actually boarded them once, a few days back. Now _that_ had been a fight.

Much later, as the sun began to set, the ship was in tatters. "Nak," Willoughby asserted.

Eridan glared. "Who. Even. Asked you!?" he shouted, punching the crocodile in the snout to assert his dominance. Normally it's a terrible idea to put your hand that close to a crocodile's mouth, but Eridan's anger leant him strength and courage, and he sent the four-foot high creature flying all the way to the prow. Eridan found he only had one bullet left. He took careful aim at the helmsman of one of the vessels and squeezed the trigger.

He blew a fist sized hole in the Carapacian, who slumped onto the wheel. Then, as the weight of his body finally dragged him down, the wheel dragged with him, and the ship turned sharply to the left and into the path of one of its comrades. The two collided with a sickening crunch, crippling both vessels. A fire broke out. "Hell yes!" Eridan shouted.

There came a startled cry from Willoughby. "Nak! Nak nak! NAK—" The final ship had somehow managed to flank them. Like some phantom horror, it appeared from a behind a ridge of violet rock off of starboard. It was so close Eridan could see the light glinting off the beady eyes of its Carapacian crew. The sun had set and the silver-moon was rising, with the rose-moon nowhere in sight. Eridan readied his rifle. He was as good at fighting with the bayonet as any fencer in the world. He'd fought off the boarding party before, and he could—

The sand pirates blasted him with their side-cannons, blowing his ship to smithereens. "NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—" Willoughby's smoking form flew off into the darkness as Eridan fell into the sands.

* * *

Roughly an hour later, he woke up, having drifted during his sleep. Somehow. "Sand doesn't work this way," he muttered, mouth drier than Hell. The sand all around was white, streaked with pale green, and looked a bit like candy. The silver-moon was high. It seemed his instincts had taken over and he'd swum away from the wreck while half-conscious. Eridan looked back and saw the pirates searching for valuables and possibly survivors. He imagined the look on their faces when they found out only a single troll and a half-blind crocodile had given then that much trouble. There was an island of greenish stone a ways away; if he could reach it he might have a chance. He began to swim.

It was much more difficult to move his body through sand than it had been to move through water. He struggled and sweated out what little water he had left until he felt that surely he would die, but struggle on he did. He wished he was still in Derse, even though nobody liked him but his foster-brothers. No, that was unfair, he had friends; it was just that they all had better friends. They enjoyed his company, but he was always the last option to hang out with. Was he really as bad as Dave joked? Was Dave even joking?

Then, he wished he'd never been chosen to go and be the King's ward, but apparently his genetic line was most likely to serve as a good diplomat or some such nonsense that they'd made up. Come to think of it, he'd hated the Republic the only time he'd visited. Sure the air was so humid it felt like being in the water all the time, which was good, but the people were so damn stiff, and they acted as if they didn't want to acknowledge that an individual could have value. Of course, he'd been too young to express that in words. Instead, he cried that first night, because he realized he hadn't fit in anywhere. Not Derse, and not his alleged homeland. Then the queen had come and held him, and they'd played wizards all through the night.

Goddammit, was he crying? That was impossible; Eridan was so dehydrated he wasn't sure how his heart was still beating. And yet, his face was covered in something wet and sticky—ah, it was blood. They were shooting at him again. Eridan's dark clothes must have stood out like a goddamn beacon against the whiteness of the sand. It looked like silver fire in the moonlight. Eridan cursed Willoughby and all of his descendants.

A shell exploded only a few feet away, showering Eridan with sand and rock. He heard a whistling sound and had just enough time to think, "Wow, they must really hate me," before another shell struck close enough to him that he flipped up into the air and plopped down in the fine powder, sinking up to his head. He was almost certain he'd broken something and was bleeding in several more places, or he should have been, but his blood was feeling very sluggish now, and he was certain he'd die of the lack of water before the pirates managed to actually hit him with anything.

He looked at the approaching ship, creeping ever closer across the silver-white sand, and he gave it the finger.

It exploded in a magnificent ball of rainbow fire. Eridan heard a whooshing noise, like the beating of enormous wings, as he passed out. His last thoughts were, "I really am a wizard!"

* * *

Something sharp poked Eridan in the cheek. A girlish voice called to him in a sing-songy tone. "Wake up sleepyhead!" He opened his eyes, and beheld the most beautiful pair of green eyes he'd ever seen.

* * *

The coup went off without a hitch. As soon as the Royal and Heir and the princess were dead, all of the Dersite agents came out of hiding and launched a perfectly coordinated attack against Prospit's infrastructure. Aside from the Paladins at the palace, in the Regent's pocket since time immemorial, and a token force left alive to 'maintain continuity into the new regime', the Knights of Prospit were no more. They'd been slaughtered to a man, as their heavy armor and unmaneuverable mounts made them easy targets in the cramped city streets. Their headquarters were burned to the ground, the statues of the Prospitian monarchs pulled down, and every single golden banner in the city replaced with one of purple.

Queen Jane was taken into custody, which is to say a guard was posted at the door to the tower where she spent all of her time knitting. The throne would pass to Jade as soon as she married. She would choose a Dersite prince or her mother would meet with an unfortunate accident.

Jade spent the first day in bed, feeling sorry for herself.

On the second day she pulled herself together and went to go see her mother, at which point she fell apart again, sobbing into her mother's lap as the older woman brushed her hair. "Now now Jade darling, what's this all about?"

"They killed John, mom. Him and Rose together. She was their own princess! They just don't care about anyone at all—"

"Oh, John?" her mother interrupted, sounding more surprised than anything. "Is that what this is all about? I think you'll find the Heir doesn't like to stay dead. He'll spend awhile in the otherworld and once he gets bored he'll come back to play with us mere mortals."

Jade looked up at her mother, wide-eyed. She was a handsome woman, and had probably been beautiful in her youth. She cropped her hair short, grey streaked with black now. Jade could see both herself and her brother in her, especially in the eyes; just a shade away from John's. She started weeping again. "What's all this? Not a proper way for a Witch to behave, no not at all. Once upon a time you would have moved planets to get your way, and often did. You once caught yourself crying and gave yourself a fine beating so you'd have something to cry about at least." It was all nonsense, bits and stuff from half-remembered fairy tales, but for some reason it made Jade happy.

"I'm scared," she muttered, along with something half sob and half chuckle.

The queen smiled. "Don't be. We all die sometime, and then we get to come back and explore. How would our lives have been different if things had been otherwise? If Derse and Prospit had been neighbors, if I had married the Page, if your brother had gotten on with Dan better. We just keep coming back, time without end, to try and do better the next time." The old woman yawned. "I'm tired now Jade. Don't worry about me; I don't think I can die. I think I'm made of life."

Mother hadn't been quite right since father died, and she'd retreated from society altogether once Daniel, the oldest son, was killed at Lohac. He'd been more like a father to the twins than their own father had been. Anyway, the queen had started raving about the Four, rattling off facts about their lives and personalities as if she had actually known them. She claimed the Witch was Jade's namesake, even though none of them had had a name. At least now, she seemed to be making an effort, even though Jade didn't understand anything she was saying.

Jade gave her mother a hug and whispered a thank you, then straightened herself up. She set her jaw, dried her eyes, and marched out of the room with a determined expression. The guard, a paladin, shied away just slightly as she glared at him. "If you touch my mother, I will put one right here," she flicked his forehead, "right in between those baby blacks." He squinted at her. She glared back. He averted his gaze.

As she stormed down the halls, Jade felt a fire burning inside of her, and it needed an outlet or it would burn her to ashes. It was hungry and roaring, no—howling like a wolf. She wanted to tear something's throat out with her teeth. Had she really just thought that? She'd never thought she could be so angry before. It was awful, and yet it was also wonderful, as if power were building up inside of her and anger was just the fuel, that would be burned away in a glorious burst. She didn't notice, but her long black hair had started to stand up, since she left her mother's tower, fanning out behind her like a living thing.

She didn't have much of a plan, only an idea, but it would have to serve.

Jade went to her room and changed. She was still wearing her golden nightgown. Goddammit, she was in mourning. But she also had work to do. She threw on some old black clothes from the back of the closet, a short but thick black dress and a black cowl, and some serviceable red shoes. A splash of color never hurt anyone.

Under her bed, there was a secret compartment. Father had installed it and taught her how to access it. The technique made almost no sense, and seemed to rely on wishful thinking more than anything. She supposed it was somewhat logical, in an internally consistent sort of way rather than a common-sense sort of way, as it was meant to serve only as a last hope.

After a few minutes of fumbling, she opened it, and drew out her father's massive rifle. It was taller than she was, seemingly crafted of yellow and white gold, and so ornately carved that there could have been no way for it to fire. The bore was so wide the bullets must be the size of ducks. Or they would be, if the thing fired bullets. In truth, it required no ammunition at all. Just a strong spirit, or so father had said. That's why he'd left it to her. John was spirited alright, but he was all air and light. "You though," he'd said, "You are fire and lightning and the coldness of space. Or you will be, someday."

A spark of green and yellow passed between her fingers. She concentrated, and more appeared, forming into a tentacled ball of emerald fire. "Well, today must be the day," she muttered. Then she climbed out the window.

* * *

Authors note: Oh shit neither Karkat nor Vriska were in this chapter sorry.

It's to my benefit that the two most socially awkward trolls, Eridan and Equius, both have a 'royal' class in canon. Obviously in this world they were raised by humans, and therefore would not fit in with regular trollish society. They basically only hang out with Dave and a few others. Also, I can't help but write Dave and Nepeta as friends.

Eridan's a sea-gangster. I mean, a land pirate.

This site kept messing up my little act-breaks that I like to put in, so I added the 'horizontal lines'. Hope it's not too ugly. And of course I'll go back and fix the others! Someday...

Also, I love that you're all favoriting an following and suchlike, but nothing inspires a writer more than constructing criticism, so if you could just take some time to leave a review explaining what you liked and how I can improve, we'll all be very happy together. Yes indeedy...


	5. And The Wind Began to Howl

There was heat and light and sound and pain, and John's Breath became frightened and left his body. Free, no longer bound by its fleshly prison, it first spiraled around listlessly, unaccustomed to an independent existence, and then took off in a random direction. The city was bright and golden and filled with sorrow and pain. The Breath, lacking a consciousness and relying only on the most basic instincts of its former host, fled in terror. Not only from the terrible sensations, but from all that monstrous yellow. There was nothing of itself in yellow.

These sensations were quickly forgotten when it encountered the desert. A hundred million shades of blue welcomed it, and other lesser colors, and it played for many days, stirring up great storms and twisters until eventually it grew bored. The Breath came across a caravan one night filled with frightened men; they were carrying something black and hideous in their carriage and the Breath was tempted to smash it to pieces, but the stars blazed a warning; things must happen as they should.

The breath turned around. The next day it came to a low place of green stone. The women inside huddled at its passing and made a funny sign with their hands; the Breath felt it should leave them alone. A spring nearby turned into a bubbling stream, and having yet to experience water, the Breath was in awe.

It followed the stream for a long while, remarking at its fluidity. It was like itself, and yet not, lacking substance yet exerting pressure, essential to life yet capable of great destruction, and it so wonderfully reflected the sky. The Breath loved all things blue. And of course it could perceive them. It perceived everything in all directions all at once, it perceived its host back in the city and the excruciating pain it was in, and the Great Breath that had birthed it and enveloped the entire world with Itself (even now it was calling for the Breath to return to Itself and become one again), but most of all it perceived blue. Everything had some smidgen of blue in it that, to the Breath's enigmatic senses, burned brighter than the sun overhead, glaring at it with stern motherly disapproval. Who cared about Her though? She was so damn yellow.

It met some interesting people on the way, bickering about something or other. The Breath decided it liked them, and reduced itself to a gentle breeze. It played with the female's hair, wiped the sweat from her brow, and examined her face. Her lips and eyelashes blazed like fire in its perception, but more interestingly, her irises were just beginning to fill in with cobalt at the edges, and it burned against the grey like the coronas of an octuple eclipse. The Breath was beginning to appreciate subtlety.

Vriska didn't much like the wind blowing in her face like that. "Ugh! What the fuck, it was coming from behind a second ago!"

"What was?" asked Karkat, sounding disinterested.

"Are you stupid," she asked, shielding her face with her hands (the Breath curved around it), "The wind is trying to kill me over here!"

Karkat laughed at her. "I don't feel anything. Maybe the prince is blowing kisses all the way from the palace?"

"That may well be the stupidest thing you have ever said, and you have said a lot of stupid shit over the years Karkat Vantas! You need to stop reading so many stupid romance novels. I swear to God, they are all the same!" The Breath agreed with what little of her speech it understood and hurled Karkat's hat up into the air, revealing a casque of shiny aluminum paper. If the Breath had had a physical body it may have died from shock at seeing something so bright and wonderful. It snatched up the foil and flew away with it, the beautiful blue girl's cruel laughter carrying in its wake for many miles as the boy struggled to reclaim his hat.

It came to a place where the multicolored sands were so fine that when it blew on them they would become almost like mist, but the winds here were very diligent and refused to let the Breath play very much. It was forced to just breeze around and watch, until it found a place out of their way. The Breath found signs of strife; many ships were scattered around here, burning or burned out, and there was a great vorpal blob of rainbow colored glass, upon which sat a ruby colored creature with one eye holding the tattered remains of a sail.

"Nak!" said Willoughby to the wandering soul. The beast-men were much more in tune with the spiritual world than their more 'intelligent' brethren. "Nak, nak!" he called, curling a claw enticingly. The Breath drew closer and Willoughby gesticulated eastwards with fevered 'naks', then jumped off the glass blob und unfurled his sail.

The Breath caught on immediately and snatched up the sail, carrying the creature eastward. It was much tickled by the idea of granting a land creature the power of flight, and was glad it had thought of it when it perceived how funny looking the little ball of red was, dangling from the sail and nakking for its life.

Eventually Willoughby asked the lost soul to deposit him on a certain island several miles from where they had started, a great green mound where the other air-currents dared not travel. The sand swirled around it, green and silver in two perfect intertwining spirals. There were many natural caves in its side, and standing in one of them, looking confused and mildly ill, there was a troll. The breath blew Willoughby into the troll, and would have laughed at them if it had been able. Instead it just blew through the caves at high speed, making a whistling sound as it came out the other side of the island.

The Breath turned south, and continued in that direction until the sand became hard and stayed that way no matter how hard it blew on them. The Great Breath from whence it came could have shattered the ground easily; once again it implored the Breath to return. The Sun remonstrated the lesser Breath, saying that it needed to find its host for he would die without a soul. Such a bossy lady. The Breath would stay out a bit longer, just to spite her.

Eventually it found a huge camp of colors; not nearly as vibrant as that of the Painted Desert, but still just as wonderful to its perceptions. It made the cloths flutter and shake for its amusement until it noticed a white figure dressed in red and purple. Purple had much blue in it, and even red had a little, but white was one of the better colors, for it had a touch of everything inside. It observed the figure for a while.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" asked Dave, wrapping his cape tightly around himself against the sudden wind.

Nepeta shook her head sadly. "We relied on him so much Dave! He kept complaining he was overworked, but we never knew how much he actually did until he was gone! Without him around it was just a matter of time before the machine broke down."

Aradia cleared her throat. "I must respectfully disagree. Your majesty—"

"Hold your fucking horses," said Dave just a bit more tersely than he normally would have. "First of all, I ain't no majesty. I may be the fucking chief of some war band of crazies hopped up on sugar but that does not warrant a 'majesty'."

"With the king dead—"

Dave held up his hand. "I have never been in line for no succession. Equius is king now, of all twenty of us survivors, and however many merchants happened to be running around—fuck do you know how much power I'd have to give up to be king now? I changed my mind; you can call me Honorable Tyranny."

Aradia sighed. "Your Honorable Tyranny—"

"Girl I was just playing come on; don't call me that bullshit clown title. And stop acting so damn formal I know that you're just a big old ball of crazy under that maid uniform—" he slapped his forehead as Aradia developed a scandalized look while Nepeta flushed a bright olive hue and beamed, turning her head between the two of them. "That's not what I meant, shut up both of you. Aradia, don't be mad. Give us one of your big crazy smiles now."

Aradia twitched slightly, holding back her anger, and stretched her face into a huge grimace that revealed all her teeth; they were perfect by human standards, shamefully flat by trollish ones. "I think," she said, with faux enthusiasm, "that the machine was sabotaged."

Nepeta gasped. "But who would do something like that?"

To Aradia, Dave said, "Why you gotta do everything I say? Don't smile if you don't mean it." She gave an exasperated groan. To Nepeta, Dave said, "the Beforans." Then counting off his fingers, he continued, "the Alternians. The Prospitians. The Patriarch of the Church of the Sufferer. All the little beast-man provinces wanting independence. The real question is who wouldn't sabotage us?" He straightened his sunglasses. "All that said I think Nepeta's right. None of them could have gotten close enough to the stupid thing."

Aradia screamed, clutching at her hair. "You are impossible!"

"There we go!" he said, snapping his fingers. "You're finally letting your real self out. To celebrate I'm gonna make you both duchesses. Duchii?"

Aradia raised an eyebrow. "I thought you weren't going to be king, Dave."

Dave smirked. "I'm the Grand Highblood now and I own all the Dersites so I can do what I want."

The Breath grew bored; it had not yet developed a taste for political intrigue and just wanted to see bright and colorful things doing stuff. These things were certainly colorful enough, but not doing much of anything besides talking. The Breath struck them with itself, whipping itself up into a stiff breeze and then a wind, until it whipped away Dave's delicious red cape and revealed the exquisite colors of the war-hammer.

The breath felt an intense warmth from it, as if it and the hammer were meant to belong to the same host, though it could not conceive of why it felt that way. There was a familiarity to the hammer though, as if it had once been held by someone very close to its host. Once again the sun beat down on the Breath to remind it of its responsibility. The Breath in truth didn't want any of that, it wanted to be free. It liked not having a host. So what if that stupid meaty shell died? What did that even mean?

The Breath blew away towards the southwest now, 'til the great golden eye finally moved on in frustration and the stars winked into being. Where once they had been amused by its antics however, they were now quite annoyed, and they had many more pupils with which to glare than the sun. 'Man the fuck up,' the stars seemed to be saying. 'You have shit to do.' The Breath ignored them, but felt oddly sad at disappointing them.

The Breath found the River of Dew and Glass where it curved northward again. It was in awe, having difficulty reconciling the white swirling expanse with the calm stream it had encountered all that time ago (what was time? It didn't know). What's more, there were shining clear stones in the water, and it wanted them, but was not strong enough to part the waters and contented itself to watch. Eventually the river emptied into a dark marsh, a huge expanse of lazy water from which rose towering mangrove trees, unique among the vegetation of the far South for having green foliage rather than indigo. Their roots and branches tangled so much that rarely, if ever, did the full light of the sun penetrate. Here it would be safe from those judging eyes in the sky, it thought. It didn't notice how it had diminished over time; where once the Breath had been a massive thing, laying all about itself with whirlwinds and gales; now it was just a breeze, barely making ripples in the blackish water. But that had been so long ago; maybe it had only dreamed of being strong?

Some fat yellow creatures swimming just beneath the surface perceived the wind and followed it, their bloated forms slicing easily through the water. It raced with them a while, and growing more excited they breached like dolphins, jumping high into the air in an attempt to touch the Breath, blowing bubbles with excitement. Their saliva was a vibrant blue, and the Breath bounced the bubbles around like a child trying to juggle until they popped from its exertions. It passed some other salamanders on occasion, standing awkwardly on squat yellow legs atop the protruding mangrove roots. They bowed in their secret custom, as their people revere the Great Breath above all others. Hands held close to their sides, the salamanders bent themselves double to touch the ground with their snout, burying it in mud if need be. They looked ridiculous, and yet, they did not. How would anyone look when confronted with a piece of their God?

Distracted, the Breath almost didn't notice the great groaning sound up ahead, and the swell of water as something rose from the depths. When it did, it wished for a mouth with which to gasp in joy. The most colorful thing it had ever seen, growing huger and more brilliant with every passing second, rising up and past the trees, snapping off whole branches with its passing. The Breath left the Salamanders behind and went after its new toy, damn the sun and stars' disapproval.

Dangling beneath the radiant ball of color was a dull brown seedpod filled with water, letting out an enormous amount of the liquid. The Breath pushed against it with its little remaining strength, wondering how something so huge could fly. It pushed the seedpod a long, long way, all the way back towards the desert. The seed released a great deal of water, but it showed no sign of stopping.

Down below, a mighty trumpet-beast honked its twin trunks; a helium seedpod in the desert! Never in its hundred years had it seem such a sight.

From its back, Equius watched in amazement, and checked his map. Sure enough, the ancient piece of parchment depicted such sights in the swamps to the south. He'd taken it for artistic folly and speculation, like the engravings of sand-serpents in archaic maps of the Painted Desert, but here it was. And sure enough, the thing was heading north while he was heading east. He asked the girls to alter their direction, and they turned the trumpet-beast's heavy head with telekinesis; much easier than regular steering. The salamanders had something Equius needed.

The Breath wanted to bother the new interesting creatures on the ground, but came to the realization that they were heading where it had just come from, and it did not want to go back. Its strength was failing already and it could no longer exert much effort on the seedpod. It followed the thing instead, higher and higher, no matter that it was getting that much closer to the sun's domain. They climbed so high, both the sun and the stars were visible at once, and they reprimanded the Breath, but it could barely understand them anymore; it was about to blow out. And suddenly, the great colorful airbag burst.

The Breath would have dissipated from the impact if not for the gentle embrace of the Great Breath. It held the much weakened Breath close, reinvigorating it, filling it with Itself until it was strong again. The Breath gained some knowledge; this had happened before and would do so again, time without end. It was a natural process, and it would never truly lose itself. If the Breath could have whimpered however, it would have. It did not want to be reabsorbed. It wanted to go on with its unique existence. Not a part of some whole, but whatever it was right _now_.

The Great Breath understood, seemed amused even, for what the lesser Breath wanted was exactly the same as what the lights in the sky had been pressing it to do. There was only one way for it to go on, it explained; to rejoin with its host. And even then, one day John would die, and his Breath would return to Itself; that was the way of the world. Perhaps one day the Great Breath would want to be human again and send out that piece of Itself once more. The now much rejuvenated Breath agreed with solemnity. Its own existence would once again be bound up to that fleshly prison, but it would still be free, in a way.

The Great Breath hurled the lesser one down at the golden city of Prospit. Now it was a gale, much stronger than it had ever been, and so blue that some screamed the sky was falling. It surged through the streets, going everywhere at once until it found its host, tearing the Dersite banners as it went, though it knew not why.

There was a creature that was close. She had been there nearly every day of the host's life and was so similar, but she already had a Breath, and something else as well, something green and black and blazing bright. It stroked her long black hair in reassurance and went on its merry way. She smiled for a second, and then someone called out in recognition and she ran with all her strength, resolving to cut it short.

There was another being that he almost didn't recognize, for his hard black shell had become grey and splotchy. He was terrified when he saw the breath, for the Seer had told him this day would come. The Breath chased him a ways, trying only to scare him, and he fled inside his house. The Breath dealt it a massive blow and the foundations cracked, but they held.

It beheld a being so strange that it could not help but stop and gawk. One eye of his was a dim red, but the other blazed like a thousand suns in its blueness. It had been so long since the Breath had thought about this creature that it had almost forgotten it. The Breath swirled around Sollux. He glared back determinedly. The Breath left.

It found a cart with a great deal of somethings inside, covered with a tarp, but only barely. They were long and round and glittered a shiny gold. For the first time, the Breath felt rage, and smashed the cart to pieces, the burden-beast and driver running off screaming in separate directions. The force of the blow opened a nearby window and then—

* * *

John woke up coughing, lungs on fire. He could not say whether he had been awakened by the sound of deep sonorous clanging outside, like a church bell had been dropped from a great height, or by the excruciating pain in his chest like his lungs had been filled far beyond their capacity and somehow not burst. He could scarcely have imagined the pain he was experiencing now, and yet somehow, he never felt stronger. This, despite a certain lightness on his right side. He lifted his hands, and was confused when one of them did not appear. He looked around, and saw that his arm was missing just below the elbow.

John grimaced, and felt tightness on the right side of his face. He tried to touch it his right hand, grew frustrated, and stood up, looking for a mirror. There was a small one on the nightstand, cracked and tarnished with age. John frowned. Even without his glasses, he could see there was a thick ugly scar with ropy tendrils snaking across the right side of his face and his eye was glazed and unfocused, a sickly pale now. He set it down and sat on the bed a while, trying not to think.

Someone walked into the room. They made no noise and just stood in the doorway tentatively, as if waiting for John to make a move. John knew there was a doorway in the back of the room opposite the window because he could feel a slight draft coming from it. The person had made absolutely no sound, but their slight carriage, possibly Carapacian, was diverting the draft ever so slightly. Without thinking, John said, "I had a dream."

The person spoke. "Yes, Highness?" Slightly frantic, male, definitely Carapacian from the way his chitinous lips clicked together. John had never noticed it before, but he realized it was true. Somehow he was getting a lot more information from sounds and sensations than he had any right to. "I dreamed that I went everywhere and was a part of everything. I had perfect freedom, but it was like a child's freedom. No responsibility because I didn't know any better. I almost died, a complete final death with no coming back, just to avoid it. Honestly I'm embarrassed, even if it was just a dream."

John tried to grin, but it came out as more of a grimace. He turned to look at his host. He was a small, lower class Carapation with tombstone teeth and a black shell, wearing white. "I'm sorry, but you know who I am and I don't know you. What's your name?" he asked.

"Warweary Villein," he chittered nervously, as if he didn't want John to recognize him. John tilted his head and frowned. Carapacian naming customs were obscure enough without having to deal with an alias. They were all given a true name at birth known only to family, and a pair of initials to present to the world, conforming to their current role in society. All the same, he had given away a lot. Warweary indicated that he had seen war, obviously, and villain that he was a free man, but there had never been serfdom in Prospit.

"You're a defector?" John asked.

The Villein jumped, startled, and nodded. "But I am loyal to the king of Prospit sire. You are him."

John nodded, not in confirmation, but in acknowledgment. "You want to keep that under your hood for awhile?" He reached up and patted his head in confusion. John couldn't help but chuckle. This guy was so odd; even a former Dersite should understand common turns of phrase. It was as if Modern Trollish was not his native language, which was absurd. Carapacians had only ever been from one or another of the twin cities, and the cities had always spoken Trollish. "I meant that you should keep it a secret."

"Yes," he said, nodding frantically. "I have. Not a soul has known you are here for a month. That would be bad. Yes, very." A month? Shit. "Sire? Why do you wake up now?"

John thought for a bit, scrunching up his face, trying not to think about it. "I think," he said, slowly, "I ascended."

The Carapacian nodded as if he had expected as much. "There was a great wind outside, all throughout the city. Blue, strong, dangerous. Smashed a cart, smashed the window."

"You seem to be losing command of your Trollish," John muttered, thinking about Terezi. When the Seer had ascended, every psychically vulnerable troll in the city had had terrible nosebleeds and night terrors. Maybe she'd experienced something like he had. "What about Rose?"

The Villein made a pained noise and handed him something. A lock of silver-white hair wrapped in a lilac ribbon. John held it tight as the floor gave way beneath his stomach. Damn. He'd only known the girl such a little while. He'd liked her. He almost wished he'd done more than just like her, but that was just the stress and the pain and the trauma making up things that had never been there. All the same, he wished he could have died in her place. He resolved not to cry.

John noticed that indeed there was broken glass on the floor. Out the window there was a smashed cart, and dozens of golden tubes scattered across the street. Soon, people would stop being frightened and run out to collect it, if it was real. He had a sinking feeling that it was. "I want to go outside."

In a few minutes he too was dressed in a white cloak and some comfortable sandals. He and the Villein inspected the wreckage, with the dark little Carapacian helping John walk. Though he _felt_ like he could run a marathon, his muscles had atrophied, though not as much as they should have, he noticed.

John's heart sank. The pipes littering the street had been mercilessly chopped from his organ. They'd cut the heart right out of the palace and sold off its arteries. He picked one up. It was long enough to use as a cane, and even curved at one end where it had once molded along a wall. The other end had been cut at an angle and was noticeably sharp. The Villein chirped, pointing upwards. Dozens of eyes were watching them from the upper storey windows of the slums. The pair quickly retreated.

For the next few hours, John and the Villein watched the ensuing melee from the spire of the Villein's house as the Carapacian explained the recent goings on to him. John sighed at the treachery of the Ascendant Regent. He was glad that Jade had escaped the palace, though who knew where she had gone? He was sure he'd glimpsed her during his ascension, but _where_? He could see the delicate spires of the palace, topped with perfect golden spheres. One of them was cracked open like an egg. Apparently his mother had set a trap off in her room when the assassins came for her. No one knew if she was alive or dead.

Down below there were people of all races running around and fighting over John's wonderful pipes. He never realized how much he loved the organ until he saw a troll get one of her horns smashed off with it. He'd never thought that people in his own beloved Prospit could behave this way. He wanted to blame Derse, but he found he couldn't. A month wasn't enough to degenerate people like this. There had always been suffering in the golden city, but it had been swept under the rug to help maintain the metropolitan image. If John was going to be king, and he felt an increased urgency to become so, he would need to shoulder a great deal of responsibility. He wasn't ready.

But he was ready to learn. "Tomorrow," he said, "You're going to find me a job near here." The Villein gasped and shook his head emphatically. "But tonight," John interrupted, putting his one hand on the Carapacian's chitinous shoulder, "we have a prophecy to fulfill."

* * *

The Ascendant Regent was in agony. He rang a bell, summoning his butler, and commanded him to bring him some more ointment. Somehow he had become infected with a fungus that ate away at his shell and left him covered in weeping sores. It had reached a very…sensitive area. His wife had left him when she learned of his betrayal of the royal family. Didn't she understand that he had done it for her? Now they could live comfortably en perpetua, instead of waiting for the royal brats to kick them out of the limelight eventually. The Dersites had given him a bloody Viceroyalty! And what did she say? "Curse God and die."

He looked up at the palace. The smoke was still rising from Queen Jane's tower. She'd chosen him personally to oversee the growth of her children and her kingdom. How disappointed she must be, he thought, to see it all handed over to her eldest son's murderers. He scratched at the side of his face until it bled. Curse God and die. Where the fuck was his ointment!?

He stepped outside, and instantly sensed something was wrong. He cautiously made his way around a corner, careful not to upset any of the new purple banners (they go so well with yellow, he thought), and saw his butler impaled to the wall with a short stabbing spear.

The Regent ran back into his study where he kept a variety of guns mounted to the wall, and chose the largest and most deadly looking he could find. He inspected carefully and loaded a magazine with precise expertise. Prospit controlled some substantial sulfur mines but had little access to wood; the Dersite landscape was littered with ancient charcoal from the legendary cherub attack, but had few of the other necessary minerals for black powder, especially not sulfur. Naturally, neither city wanted the other to have access to both. Ammunition was therefore expensive as Hell; he needed to keep his guns in good shape. He turned, ready to go out and face whatever may be coming—

And was blown back into a wall by a wind that was more like a massive fist. In stepped two figures all in white; one crouching low, holding a quiver full of javelins, the other wielding a heavy pipe. No, it couldn't be, he thought. Those blue eyes were too intense to be the poor laughing boy they'd had killed. They, not he, he wanted to insist, but those eyes would brook no argument, he knew.

"Nice to see you again," said John with no trace of humor in his voice. "Goodbye." The Regent's head burst like an overripe melon. Somewhere in the city, John was sure, Terezi was laughing her ass off.

* * *

A while later, John stood outside the Regent's mansion, shaking. He'd liked the bastard, but a bastard was a bastard. Right? He'd never killed anyone before. God forgive me, he thought, as a tear dripped from his good eye, but a king needs to make the hard decisions. He lifted the pipe to his mouth and blew. A stream of blue streaked out accompanied by a hard, flat, mournful sound. He'd wondered if the thing would still make noise. He took comfort in that as the mansion crumbled. The Villein scrawled something on the street in Old High Trollish. Roughly translated, it said "thus always to tyrants."

* * *

Author's note: You didn't think I'd actually killed John? Generously speaking we are over halfway through this fic. Everyone just needs to fins their treasures and go the fuck home. Barely mentioned Karkat and Vriska; I promise the next chapter is quite long and will focus on them. So far I'd only written for stoic Aradia(bot if you will), but the moment she cracked that smile in Wake I knew we were destined to be….I didn't just say that.

I'd written up to chapter seven before I started posting here, and chapter eight is on the way! I've got some other fics started though, for y'all to read in the interim, which I'll start uploading once we're caught up as it were.


	6. Angels, Ponderance

After a month had passed, the vivid colors of the sand faded to a bright but uninteresting golden-brown. The mornings were cool and grey with fog rolling off the sea. When Vriska first heard its dull roaring call, she was instantly filled with longing and wondered why anyone would want to live anywhere but near that sound. She contained herself however; she was well-traveled now, and did not gawk like a tourist.

So Vriska only cried a little when she actually saw the ocean for the first time three days later. "No fucking way," Karkat said, slightly in awe. Not at the majestic spread of water that stretched beyond the horizon, where the boundaries between the earth and sky melded into one glorious eternal plane of purest azure, or at the roar of the foam capped waves crashing on the rocks, or the mournful cry of a single lost seagull, but at the sight of Vriska staining their last clean handkerchief with cobalt streaks.

"Shut up," Vriska sniffled, "it's just…some sand got in my eyes."

"We've been getting sand in our eyes nearly every day for a whole month now," Karkat deadpanned. "Is this last sand-in-eye-getting the straw that broke the hump-beast's back, or are you just so moved by the beauty of Psiidon's kingdom that you have no choice but to weep?"

Vriska punched him but her heart wasn't in it. "And you're always getting on me about my books and here you are crying over a fucking puddle."

This time her heart _was_ in it. "Your books are so fucking stupid and sappy and fake! The sea is real and beautiful and not full of cheesy-ass lines like—" with one fluid motion she snapped open Karkat's saddlebags and pulled out a book. She steered Maplehoof away from Karkat as he tried to snatch it back—Vriska was a fast learner and had mastered riding in their month on the road—and started to read, beginning in a saccharine falsetto. "'Make a wish', she said, once all the candles had been lit," Karkat overextended himself and fell off his brindled riding-beast, getting a mouthful of sand. Vriska continued in a highly exaggerated male voice, "'It already came true,' I said, and kissed her long and passionately. The cake went uneaten all night long." Karkat got up and ran after her on foot, but she kept just out of reach, reading off some more select passages before reaching the edge of the sea. "Wait, hold on, if I'm reading this correctly they didn't even fuck that night! What, did they just hold hands and fall asleep next to each other? Such _laaaaaaaameness_ doesn't deserve to exist—"

She snapped her arm back and then hurled the book like a discus into the distance. Karkat gaped at the ocean in horror. "That was a limited edition—"

"Whoa," said Vriska, shielding her eyes, "It looked so blue from far away but from here it's green!"

"Signed by the author—"

Vriska closed her eyes and inhaled deeply and loudly. Karkat growled. "You always take things too far Vriska!" he snapped. "You couldn't just tease me, you had to fucking ruin my book!"

With a self satisfied look, she deigned to look down at him. "Would you hate me if I didn't go that little extra mile?"

Karkat made a frustrated sound, one that was part groan and part sigh and was terribly hard on his throat. "Probably not," he admitted. Vriska smirked, then clicked her tongue at Maplehoof and left him in her dust.

* * *

Later in the day, the two of them rode along, arguing about Karkat's hat. It was fairly thoroughly ruined after its soak in the stream and subsequent exposure to the elements. The hat was falling apart and had faded to a hideous grey spattered here and there with Technicolor stains. "Your hat looks like a clown used it for a wank-rag!" Vriska announced.

Karkat choked. "You're disgusting!"

"Give it here, I'm throwing it away—" She snatched the horrid thing off his head, releasing a cascade of tattered aluminum shreds. "Wow," she said, in a dull monotone. "Really Karkat? After all this time?" She gave him a look that would not have been out of place on a kicked puppy. "You still don't trust me?" Little pools of cobalt gathered in the corners of her eyes.

Karkat felt like absolute shit. "Goddammit, Vriska I'm sorry. I just—"

She started laughing. "Oh God, I can't keep up the 'hurt-feelings' shit anymore! That was too good! I did not _live_ until I made someone feel bad about protecting themselves. Karkat, you are such a fucking bleeding heart loser!" She rode away again.

Karkat glowered at the girl while he picked up the aluminum scraps. That stuff _was_ expensive. "The fuck's her problem today," he muttered, scowling as he watched Vriska recede into the distance, and then suddenly disappear with a yelp. Maplehoof began screaming, a sound that was disconcertingly human. "Shit," he muttered, drawing his war-sickle and running after her on foot, completely ignoring his perfectly good riding-beast. It was heavy, but the design lent itself to both one-handed and two-handed fighting.

Karkat reached the place where she had disappeared and saw a gaping hole in the sand filled with a pearlescent white substance as thick as pudding. Vriska was stuck in it, trying not to gag. Maplehoof was bellowing, trying unsuccessfully to climb out of the hole, her hard footpads gaining no purchase on the slick white walls of the pit. "What the fuck am I even looking at here?" Karkat muttered. Vriska said nothing.

"Hey, how about the magic rope?" Karkat asked. Vriska said nothing. It occurred to him that the substance might be poisonous. Vriska vomited a grotesque steam of blue stomach acid that settled on the surface of the goop like oil on water, and then screamed. She produced the rope and hurled it at Karkat. It wrapped itself around his arms and he was forced to drag her out bodily like a burden-beast.

As soon as she was on dry land, she yanked the rope so hard it knocked Karkat over and then rushed into the sea to wash the substance off. "Bring me some new clothes and a brush!" she shouted, sounding panicked. "I'm never wearing these again!" She threw the rope back at him and it coiled at his feet like a loyal pet. "Hurry or I'm going to just cut my hair off! Nobody wants that!"

Karkat giggled slightly at the idea of a bald Vriska, and pulled Maplehoof out of the pit. No sooner had he gotten her out than she ran off screaming into the desert, biting through her harnesses and leaving her saddlebags on the sand. He almost ran after her but, "leave her and throw me the brush!" shouted Vriska, now a ways away from shore, up to her neck in water. Karkat noted with a blush that her clothes had washed up on shore. She caught the brush easily and Karkat turned his back.

He decided to get her a change of clothes and prepared to rummage through her bags, but saw that they were almost coated in the stuff. How was he supposed to get it out, if it was in fact poisonous? Then he realized with a start that he was already coated in it. The magic rope had left streaks of white all along his chest and midsection, and Maplehoof had splashed both his legs to the knee when she emerged. What was Vriska's problem then, he thought as he opened the bags. Luckily, they were water-proofed drawstring bags and nothing had gotten inside. He laid out a comfortable looking yellow outfit with wide trousers and an orange cowl. And she'd been complaining about the lack of a hat all this time!

Vriska took about an hour. In that time, Karkat found his own grey riding-beast, looked for Maplehoof (and failed to find her), noticed it was getting late, and began to set up camp somewhere above the tidal line. Vriska finally came up, looking angry and shaken. "It was dead Karkat," she spat, "but it didn't die immediately! It took years to die and it melted itself down to its constituent parts and the others heard it and they cried and cried but they couldn't help it because they were all just babies—"

"Vriska calm down," he said, "you're scaring me. What are you talking about?"

Vriska growled and pushed him to the ground, then pointed over to the beach. "That thing was an egg Karkat! An _angel_ egg!"

Karkat raised himself up to a sitting position, anger bubbling. "Angels lay eggs? What the fuck are you babbling about?"

Vriska continued talking, more muttering to herself than answering Karkat's questions. She was pacing back and forth, looking around in random directions, and scratching her face, keeping her extremities close. With her hair a wet mess and her skin beginning to dry out, leaving a salty residue, she looked like a madwoman. "All that stuff all over me, I could see. Angels aren't matter they're something else, mind spirit whatever the fuck who cares, it got on me and I saw everything it saw and they see fucking everything, it's like being a god with the mind of a child and it died anyway what the _fuuuuuuuuck_—"

Karkat made the mistake of interrupting her. Jumping to his feet, he snapped in a deliberate and authoritative tone, "Vriska I got that stuff all over me too and I didn't see anything."

Vriska clutched at her hair so hard her knuckles turned white and howled in frustration. "Well you aren't even a real troll Vantas so who cares—"

Karkat punched her in the face. She was sturdier than he realized and only barely staggered from the blow. Vriska spat out a glob of cobalt blood and glared at him with bloodshot eyes as a vein in her temple suddenly bulged and throbbed. "Go the fuck away Karkat." He mounted his riding-beast and galloped away.

It took her a moment to realize what she'd done. "Shit," she said, running after him. "Come back!" But he was too far away to hear her, and she was so unaccustomed to touching Karkat's mind that she was unable to contact him from a distance. He would keep going for as long as it took to wear off. Would he come back then? "Who cares," she said out loud to herself. "He hit _me_. So what if I was acting like a crazy person? And mean to him all day. All month really. And I'm always taunting him about his blood color."

Vriska bit down on her tongue to stop its traitorous babbling, but her mind continued churning out traitorous thoughts like an unlicensed Beforan printing press. She'd said he wasn't a real troll. Why the fuck would she even say that? Black was the hardest and most dangerous quadrant because it was so easy to tip over into platonic hate, and a troll's platonic hate could be fatal. And now Karkat had left her alone in the desert with nothing but some saddle-bags she couldn't touch without going insane and a near infinite amount of water that she couldn't drink, next to the rotting corpse of a minor deity. "Knights are supposed to be gentlemen," she sniffed. But what she thought was "you're going to die, and it's all your own fault."

She crept into the tent and let the sound of the ocean lull her to sleep. Vriska dreamed of dead angels screaming in pain. Angels have no mouths, so they screamed in silence.

* * *

The mind-thing had finally worn off, but Vriska had made it very clear that his company was no longer wanted. It was so easy to slip up and you should never take a kismesis for granted, Karkat thought. Knights are supposed to be gentlemen, dammit. Karkat could feel the disapproving glares of everyone who had ever had a modicum of respect for him. John was probably going to flip the fuck out if he found out and smash Karkat's head like an overripe melon, as he deserved. How dense did he have to be to not see that Vriska was in fucking distress? How many times had he seen shit like this on the job? Not people who'd been psychically molested by angel corpses of course, but still, he should have been able to tell trauma from standard bitchiness and backed the fuck off, acknowledged that people could say things they don't mean under circumstances.

She…hadn't meant it right?

She was always mocking him about his blood color.

These were the multifarious self-pitying thoughts Karkat thought all night, resting against the flank of his riding-beast. It didn't have a name. He'd just never gotten around to it. The custom was to join two nouns, like Maplehoof or his old mount Iceheart, the fickle bitch that had thrown Vriska into a tree and was never seen again. "Fuckslayer," he muttered at the creature.

Karkat did not sleep. He had immense willpower and could go for days without. The only reason he didn't keep traveling through the night is because trolls and –beasts _did_ have to sleep. It was kind of annoying. Now they'd reached the coast, it was only a few days to the City of Wrath, but it had taken a month to get this far. How long would it take to search a city? One full of—what, angel eggs? They called it their spawning ground. The idea was not comforting. He'd never be able to get back to Jade.

Fuck, did he even deserve Jade? He was a terrible woman-punching piece of shit. He shouldn't force his presence on polite company. No, he couldn't go to her now. But what else was there to do but trudge on? Maybe he could give the treasure to Vriska if she allowed him near her again. Bluh.

A few hours later, the sun rose, and Karkat nudged Fuckslayer awake. He saw a stony crag off in the distance, at least another day's ride away. He checked the map; Vriska had made him an exact copy because he'd kept bitching about it. Yes, that was the hill next to the City. It was much closer to the Prospit side of the desert than the Derse one, not the exact middle, but the notes Vriska had scrawled on the back of the thing indicated that it was the only such formation on the Bright Coast, and that the mapmaker's coordinates placed it at one-third the distance between the two cities. He mounted Fuckslayer and rode off.

A few hours later, Karkat was getting slightly sunburnt from lack of a hat. This irritated him. Trolls had apparently been nocturnal once and many of them suffered sun-damage, but it usually manifested itself as dryness and disorientation. Humans burned. "Fuck you, Vriska," he muttered, then tried to take his mind off things. He could just barely make out shapes in the distance, white against the blueness of the crag. It was too low on the hill for it to be snow, so it must be the city.

As time went on, he could make out distinct shapes and impressions. Tall gothic towers, flying buttresses, pointed arches, gargoyles and monsters and meaningless spikes and knobs. It reminded him of Prospit, but it seemed to him a poor imitation.

There was a legend. When humanity first emerged, they felt envious of the beauty of the twin cities, which had yet to open and would not do so for another 1500 years. They built their own cities in the style of Prospit and Derse, huge and grand, from shining white stone all along the coast, and it became a mighty kingdom. For all of ten years, until the coming of the angels. A punishment for their hubris, so the trolls say. The only thing left of that kingdom was the one city, where the angels now spent their formative years and no sentient being dared to tread.

The humans of course, blamed the trolls, but most ancient trollish sites feature the prefix 'Lo' whereas the only name for the city is in Modern Trollish, so who—

Karkat was so caught up in speculation that he didn't notice the freshly spawned angel sunning itself on a rock, awaiting its first molt. It had a hideous white body shaped vaguely like a very slim human, but its waist narrowed into a long, wormy tail. It had arms surprisingly, but they were misshapen and stretched out with two awful, long fingers covered in fine little scales. Karkat surmised that these would grow into feathers soon. The whole thing was covered some sort of pearlescent goop, much thinner than the stuff Vriska had fallen into though. Its face had no features. No ears, no mouth, no nose or eyes, barely a chin. It looked more like an egg than a head. And yet, it turned to him sharply and began to scream. Fuckslayer grew scared and bucked Karkat onto the sand and bolted.

The sound was all in Karkat's head, and it sounded like murder and pain and nails on a chalk-board. But it wasn't actually all that bad. They said an angel's voice could drive men insane or outright kill them. Karkat stood up, dusted himself off, and drew his war-sickle. "You think you're tough shit, huh?" It started flopping backwards, like a fish. The scream became one of alarm. It was calling for help. Karkat struck its head off, and got a faceful of pearly blood for his trouble. The body deflated and began to melt. Fuckslayer came back, curious. "It's because I'm just such a fucking badass, -beast," Karkat explained as he patted Fuckslayer's snout, feeling just a bit proud of his mutant blood for the second time in his life.

And then two more angels dove in out of the sun and attacked him, screeching obscenities in Old High Trollish directly into Karkat's brain while firing off bursts of blue-fringed white light. Their attacks warped the sand in front of Karkat into glass, but seemed to radiate cold instead of heat. Karkat mounted up Fuckslayer and galloped away, the newly-spooked riding-beast more than eager to comply. Angels however, are very fast. One of them dove in low, and he could feel its presence, like an electric charge making his hair stand up. Thinking quickly, he unclasped his cape and the creature's wings tangled in it. It fell to the sand and began to flail around.

He saw the other just above him, flying between Karkat and the sun, which only made it seem brighter, preparing to fire another beam from its chest. Its shrieking seemed more curious than angry though, probably wondering why Karkat wasn't a gibbering wreck by now. Karkat smirked. "I bet you nook-sniffing bird-shit blooded fuckers have never had to work for your food a day in your lives, eh?" He stood up on the saddle, feeling suddenly reckless, and hurled his sickle over-handed, landing a direct hit in the creature's face. Gobbets of luminescent gore and white blood rained down as the beam sputtered and puffed away in bright smoke, and Karkat waited for the thing to come crashing down.

It didn't. It kept on flying. More erratically than before sure, but the bastard was still airborne. Its mental shouts were much more erratic as well, as if damaging the angel's head had at least hurt its mind somehow. What had Vriska said? They were made of pure thought or spirit or whatever. Did that mean that they were basically giant brains? Maybe destroying the head was the equivalent of stubbing a toe for these things, since any other part of the body could perform the same function. Would he have to destroy them utterly in order to kill them? And there was a whole city of the bastards. Suddenly, Karkat's mutation didn't seem like leveling the playing field so much as equipping the rabbit with a knife against the dogs.

A wave of psychic anger surged up from behind, hitting Karkat's brain like a sledge-hammer. He turned, and saw the second angel loping along the ground, using its wings like huge feet as it hopped and slithered across the sand; the bend in its wings seemed to conceal three sharp little fingers. It was covered in shreds of red cloth burning with cold blue fire. Damn, Karkat had liked that cape.

The flying angel recovered its bearings and fired off another blast, and Karkat pulled Fuckslayer over to the right, into the path of the other angel. Its tail arced over its head like a scorpion's and loosed a salvo of cold white light. It scorched off the end of Karkat's right horn and he screamed. The stupid-looking things were packed full of nerve-endings and helped trolls keep balance; he barely held onto the saddle with one hand and foot as he choked back scarlet tears.

Dizzily, as if drunk, he reached for the saddlebags and pulled out his only other weapon. It was a small pistol that they'd only used for hunting. Wanting to throw up, Karkat wound the stupid thing, holding onto Fuckslayer only with his knees. The task was made nearly impossible as Fuckslayer was basically running wherever he wanted. However, he was a well trained riding-beast, and zigged and zagged to dodge the angelic fires, running uphill to elude the grounded monster, but all the movement was murder on the injured Karkat. When he finally managed it, he turned and shot unceremoniously, muttering "fuck your couch," too tired to think of a better line. By some miracle, the angel was much closer than it had been, and the bullet smashed its way directly through the wing-joint and into its side, maiming the creature, now hemorrhaging out pearly fluid. It wasn't dead, but it damn well couldn't move anymore. Karkat smirked—

And the ground under his -beast exploded as the flying angel got off a similarly lucky shot. Head ringing even worse now, he struggled to his feet as Fuckslayer jumped up and abandoned him. "Well I didn't like you anyway!" shouted Karkat with a rude gesture. The flying angel landed nearby. Karkat ran back towards the sea, tripping over nothing on the second step and rolling down hill. The angel loped after him, taking potshots with its tail. One of them scored his arm and a second later Karkat hit the water, face-up.

The angel pounced onto him, the sickle still planted firmly up to the hilt in its face after all this time, and Karkat stuck his legs into the air, kicking the creature over him (it hardly weighed anything at all) into the ocean. The tail, blazing with light, just barely missed Karkat's eye. It gave one final shriek as it hit the water, thrashed violently, and stopped.

Karkat lay there for about fifteen minutes until he regained some semblance of balance, then went to check on the angel. It was floating, gently rocked by the current, looking a like a fallen bird and just as dead. There were scorch marks all around the sickle. He had no idea what had happened. He pulled the weapon out of its face, which did not bleed, having been cauterized by…whatever had happened. The words on the blade, 'happiness must be earned', were now highlighted in pearlescent white. He couldn't scratch it off. Fuckslayer came back. "Some help you were!" Karkat snapped, as he leaned against the animal, leading it back towards the other angel. If it was still alive it was probably screaming for help like the baby earlier, and he had no desire to fight any more of them.

He found it a few yards from where it had been crippled, easily tracking the shiny white blood trail. It gave a cursory struggle upon seeing Karkat, knowing what would come. Its thoughts were tired and frightened. Karkat finally thought of a line. "I guess even angels fear the reaper, huh fuckstick?" he said, and brought the sickle down in a vicious arc.

* * *

Vriska woke up and noticed Karkat had yet to come back. She also noticed her lips were incredibly dry and that her skin hurt where the salt had rubbed against her in her sleep. She went outside the tent and saw that she had overslept. Her saddlebags were where she'd left them, and the corpse-goop had dried and turned the color of old milk. A swarm of crabs was picking at it. She grabbed a stick and poked them off, and the stuff came off in big powdery flakes. She then opened the bags with the stick and pulled out a canteen, drinking deeply, then ate some dry biscuit. Then she caught a handful of the crabs and ate them too.

Karkat still didn't come back. "Fine!" Vriska snapped. "I'll just go after him and drag him back here by his ear!" She had no intention of actually dragging him back, of course, because it would be nonsensical and completely delete all of their progress, but it felt good to vocalize. She packed up everything she could reasonably carry, made an obscene gesture in the direction of the angel egg, drew her knife, and set off after the –beast tracks. Obviously she had little experience with tracking, but following such a heavy animal through sand seemed easy enough. What's more, Vriska's vision was beyond perfect; she wore glasses to fool people into thinking otherwise. They didn't even have lenses. It was a credit to Karkat's mount that he'd been able to get out of her line of sight so quickly.

Regardless, even if she hadn't known to go east, she could see the City of Wrath long before the point Karkat did, only one hour after setting out. More importantly, she found Maplehoof rolling in the waves. The animal nickered in recognition and came to Vriska when she whistled as if nothing had happened. "Don't act like this fixes anything you fucking traitor," Vriska warned, as she patted the thing. She took a gentle tone so as not to startle her away again though. Of course, riding-beasts were supposedly much smarter than horses, so she probably knew anyway, and had the decency to look ashamed.

Having assumed that she would never see Maplehoof again, Vriska had left her saddle and harness behind, bringing only the saddlebags. She folded up a blanket on the animal's back and secured herself to her with the magic rope, which seemed to have variable length in addition to its other abilities. She clicked her tongue, and Maplehoof was off like a shot.

Near sundown, she came across a puddle of molten white goop. She stared at awhile, puzzled, and then moved on. A while later she found the corpse of an angel floating in the surf with a sizable hole in its head. "At least he can take care of himself," she muttered, mildly impressed. The tracks here seemed freshest, but rather than continuing east, they went uphill. Vriska followed.

She passed another angel corpse that had been thoroughly butchered. "Okay, when the _fuck_ did Karkat become such a badass?" She whispered this, fearing that he might be nearby. Something was starting to bother her about the angels though. These angels were big, but would fit fairly comfortably, if a bit tightly, inside the egg she had fallen in yesterday. The damn things were actually bigger than Maplehoof at the shoulder, but still smaller than the egg had been. Which meant they couldn't possibly have laid it. How big did the bastards get? Did they grow in stages like trolls? Were these things basically just wigglers that had yet to metamorphose into proper angels? She crested a sand dune and saw Karkat, huddled against his riding-beast with a glazed look in his eye.

He saw her, and they held each other's gaze for a moment. "Fuck," he said, and elbowed his riding-beast, prompting it to stand. He tried to climb onto its back but just fell flat on his ass instead. Vriska jumped off Maplehoof and ran up to him. "What's wrong? Drunk? I knew it, you were so lonely without me that you drowned your sorrows in medical whiskey. It's a good thing I went looking for you."

At the same time Karkat was saying, "I'm sorry I hit you please don't kill me," with such slurring slowness that for a moment Vriska thought he really was drunk, until he saw the horrid state of his right horn. It was blackened for half its length, the once rounded tip now sheared to a ragged break with a huge split down most of its length that was weeping a sickly pinkish puss.

Vriska growled. "Don't you know how to treat your own wounds?! You're such an ignorant dumbass, I swear, you _need_ me around or you'd…get your horn half burnt off!" She rummaged around in her bags until she found a flask of whiskey. They had brought it for the express purpose of cleaning wounds. She made a point of not mentioning that she'd been carrying all the medical supplies.

Vriska forced a wooden spoon into Karkat's mouth and washed his horn, doing her best to hold him down, until she decided to just give him a mild dose of mind-control when his flailing became too much. Almost half of the burnt area came off with the alcohol; the rest appeared to be just singed. There was still the matter of the crack. She couldn't do anything about that, so she just bound it tightly and hoped it would heal. Plenty of trolls broke their horns; even Vriska had a few cracks here and there; having such a magnificent pair while living on the streets was not conducive to proper horn-care, but she'd never seen anything quite like this. She couldn't let Karkat know of course. "You're going to feel like you've got a toothache in your brain and an ear-infection, but you'll be fine once it closes up," she said with an air of authority.

Karkat spat out the spoon. "That hurt like getting fisted in the brain by a trumpet-beast! You have no bedside manner! Your hands are cold, and I think you damn near broke the thing in half—" He reached up and touched it. "You DID! You broke my horn in half!" He sighed exasperatedly. "And I deserve that and worse. I'm sorry."

Vriska slapped him affectionately. It still left a mark however. "See Karkat, I hit you all the time. Who cares? Besides, I'm not some fragile human girl. I'd probably be able to kill you if I had to."

The look in her eye made him see she meant it. "Okay, threats, cool," he said, nodding.

Vriska slapped her forehead. "_Dammiiiiiiiit_ I'm picking up your habits!" She inhaled sharply. This was getting uncomfortably close to a feelings jam. "Look, it was just an accident."

"You accidentally told me to go away with your brain with such force that I made Fuckslayer gallop for three hours straight," Karkat deadpanned. "I think _you_ might be the one hitting the whiskey."

She slapped him again. Her hand lingered a little bit. 'It's just _instinct_ Karkat. I know that I'm a total badass who's good at everything, but I've lived a hard fucking life since you ran away to join the army, okay? I was barely aware that I was doing it because it's just second nature now. If someone seems hostile and I've got a full stomach I send them packing, no questions asked, even if it's a kismesis." The entire time, she declined to look at him, and instead made a study of the angel blood staining his leg. It seemed to be glowing in the lengthening dark.

Karkat sighed. "Let's just start fresh tomorrow, alright?" Vriska nodded and leaned against the riding-beast.

After a moment she said, "_Fuckslayer_? Really?"

"Don't judge me, it's fucking badass—"

"_Riiiiiiiight?!"_ she responded excitedly. They chatted into the night.

* * *

Author's note: I understand that some people seem to think that troll horns are their…erogenous zones. What is wrong with you people? I just can't accept that because it would mean poor Equius broke half his…no, just no. All the same it will make some bits of this chapter awkward for some. And of course, the damn horns have to do something, biologically speaking, so I made them be for balance and sensory input, like cat whiskers. And Vriska having a magnificent pair was a dirty pun, I'm sorry. And Fuckslayer is an allusion to 30 Hs, the strangest Harry Potter fanfic yet written.


	7. In Which Several Women are on Pedestals

"Brain the size of a planet and they had me running the bloody ventilators, I ask you," said the odd little man standing on the head of the trumpet-beast. No more than three feet high, He was a sort of flat white color, no part of him reflecting the ambient light more or less than any other so he looked two-dimensional. He had no features other than the standard number of limbs and digits, and his head was perfectly round and roughly the size of a medicine ball. His only clothing was a long colorful woolen scarf that Equius had given him the other night. The homunculus had been too proud to ask for clothing.

"I could have built them a bloody nuclear reactor if they'd asked. I could have made then bloody rulers of the whole bloody world. But all they cared about was their precious little air-clocks. The Lord forbid if the stupid little stone alligator didn't come and sing at noon precisely. And they'd insist on calling it an alligator too, even though it's a bloody crocodile. That's the thing isn't it though," he said, turning to Equius. It looked as if his body had rotated underneath his head. Equius wondered once again how the creature could see. "No one _asked_ me. People used to ask me things all the time, back when I could actually _do_ things. Still smart as balls though." He paused, raising an aristocratic finger. "A private joke. Haa haa. Hee hee. Hoo hoo."

Equius wished he still had his prostitutes.

* * *

He and his women spent some small time as the guests of the salamanders. At first they'd been mistrustful of the trolls, having rarely seen any in their lives. If trolls were too exotic, then the massive midnight-blue bulk of a trumpet-beast had them in terror, and so his party spent a good deal of time waiting and searching in vain. Equius checked his map. There was something here in the marshes, some ancient trollish site from the name; Locas. But as far as he could tell, there was nothing in the marsh that had not been crafted by the hands of either God or salamander. Furthermore, the map was more a vague representation of the entire region rather than an actual map of the marshes; while there was certainly a drawing of 'Locas', there was nothing to indicate where in the marsh it would be, not that he thought one could plot a marsh with any accuracy, at least none that would keep its accuracy after a few hundred years.

The nights were dark here, with no light penetrating through the thick foliage. The only light was the yellow-green flickering of the fireflies. They danced on the water, often alone, sometimes in a swarm, and sometimes inside the little lanterns of passing salamander boats. The boaters fascinated Equius. Why row when their thick yellow forms could swim with such elegance? They wore black robes embroidered with wispy white and grey figures like ghosts and almost always traveled in small groups. He thought they must be priests, or some fringe-members of society.

One night, he sat watching them from a gargantuan root. The lovely rust colored trees with their green-black foliage that perforated the swamp were massive enough to carry the weight of a fully grown trumpet-beast, observing the reed-boats skimming across the black waters with suspicion. The twins (having hatched from the same egg they were in fact twins) sat with their backs against the –beast communicating telepathically. They rarely spoke to Equius, and when they did he could barely understand their thick east-trollish accent. They were becoming increasingly unhappy with him, likely because there were no shops around for him to buy them things. He just wished they weren't so needy.

Oh, he knew they were prostitutes. It was obvious, what with the metallic paint and all. He wasn't born yesterday. They were also powerful psionics and a Royal Heir needs bodyguards sometimes. There were bandits in the desert and monsters in the marshes. He could swear they'd killed off an entire colony of crabdads since entering, spilling their sickly human-red blood into the black by the liter. The twins had proven invaluable, flinging the monsters with their mind even as they pierced them with the daggers they'd concealed in their hair. All the while they were silent, and generally looked at Equius with something like resentment. But as long as he paid them, well, there were no problems.

And he hadn't slept with them anyway. He was saving himself. Equius scrambled down the root and dunked his head in the filthy water to drown such lewd thoughts in brackish murk.

A bright light from above made him draw his head up from the marsh; he saw a swarm of fireflies so massive thy made it seem as if it were daytime as they passed by, and his entire party stared in wonder. Like a river of light the fireflies came, surging across the marsh for nearly an hour, turning the dark waters into the gold. Where they passed there were no shadows. A trio of passing boaters stopped their rowing and bowed in their strange salamander way. Near the end, Equius heard a rushing sound, as of something slicing across the water.

When the fireflies had passed, it was suddenly dark again. Equius had better night-vision than even regular trolls, so the glare left his eyes very quickly. Just in time in fact, to catch the gigantic worm of pale green, easily sixty feet in length, churning up the waters with its surprisingly swift movement. Its passing overturned the little reed boats, whose pilots were still bent in supplication, and with lightning-quick movement, it snatched one of them into the water, impaling it through the arm with a razor-sharp tongue.

Without thinking, Equius threw a stick at the thing. He'd meant to simply get its attention, but the twig flew like an arrow and impaled it through the tail. The worm roared in pain, churning up waters, spraying black, foul smelling foam up onto the tree trunks, even launching a canoe up into the canopy with its brave pilot still clinging to the side. The noise startled the trumpet-beast awake and it began to panic, threatening to stampede but finding nowhere to go, eyes rolling in terror, twin trunks blasting in dissonance. Fortunately, the twins had regained their night-vision and were busily subduing it with their powers, one crackling with red energy, the other with blue, as it slowly lifted off the ground.

The worm reared up in the water, towering above Equius's camp, hissing in pain and rage. The beast lowered its pale, almost human head towards Equius, and he saw its bulging black doll eyes and mouth bristling with rows of needle-like teeth. Out of the corner of its mouth, looking like a worm itself, was its razor sharp tongue, with the impaled salamander still dangling and glubbing in terror. The monster inhaled, swelling multiple times its size, the force of the suction pulling Equius forward.

At the edges of his vision, the air was turning blue. He'd heard stories about the worms of the marsh. It was said they were rebels against the Great Heir, blaspheming against his deific Breath with their profane abuse of its power. The worm exhaled, the stream of tinted air exploding into brilliant blue fire. Apparently it was true, thought Equius, as he leapt over the Breath of fire, and punched its fucking head off.

* * *

Anointed with a white robe and covered in chains of flowers, Equius and his companions were led to what he assumed was the holy site for these amphibious mystics. A long canoe ride into the center of the swamp was an island of stone, upon which were four gigantic carvings of strange creatures; people so highly stylized that he could not tell their race. It was probably, he decided, some primitive depiction of the Four. Each had its gaze turned to the center of the island, where an intricate circle had been carved into the ground. The design had countless loops, swirls, peaks and valleys, all perfectly symmetrical. It gave him the impression, somehow, that it had been drawn in a single stroke. The mystics began to sway back and forth, glubbing rhythmically.

"I believe they expect us to do something," said Equius, turning to the girls. They shrugged and said nothing. He knelt down on the carving, tapping it with his finger. A loud, hollow boom rang out. "It's something like a manhole cover," he said over his shoulder, not really expecting an answer. "Would you mind terribly?" They rolled their eyes and linked hands, passing their multicolored energy between them as they began to shift the stone.

It was much heavier than they had anticipated, as they'd underestimated the strength it took for Equius to make the stone drum sound, and they were clenching their shark-like teeth hard enough to leak indigo blood from their mouths, but eventually, they pushed the slab aside. There was a dark and ancient stairway beneath, filled with silence.

Equius's companions looked at him. He looked back. They glared. He gave a broken-toothed smile.

* * *

In the depths of the caves, the twins gave off their red and blue glow, and talked animatedly with one another. Equius didn't need it, of course, but they certainly did. He'd left the trumpet-beast with the salamanders, with explicit instructions not to eat it. He'd seen them eat; the adorable little things had retractable cones of solid bone in their mouths big enough to puncture a crabdad's shell. He hoped they had understood.

The cave system was immense. So much so, that it seemed to Equius that it should be impossible. Surely they couldn't have climbed down far enough for the ceiling to be that high? And surely the weight of the marsh up above would be enough to bring the entire thing crashing down? And suddenly there came a shrieking like a thousand nails screeching across a chalkboard at once and out of the darkness emerged a living cloud of troll-sized bats, coated in deep navy-blue fur.

The girls leapt into action immediately, readying a blast of psychic energy between their clasped hands, drawing their daggers and letting their powdered hair cascade almost to the ground. But the bats did nothing but swirl around over their heads, until a small handful of them dropped to the ground, skittering towards them on all fours and then stopping. The one directly in front of Equius was clearly ancient; his fur was long and white, except on his head wear it had all fallen off. Clasped between his wing and thumb-claw he held a gnarled staff that was clearly meant for ceremonial purposes only. "At long last, you have come," it said.

"What? Beast-men that talk?" said Equius, confused. He motioned for the girls to disarm themselves. They turned to each other and started arguing loudly.

Ignoring them, he went on. "What is this? I command you to speak since you can."

"Come, traveler, we have much to show you." The ancient crooked his thumb-claw and Equius approached. With speed belying his age, the elder leapt into the air and seized Equius's shoulders in his hooked talons. Two more quickly grabbed his legs and he was raised almost to the ceiling in an instant. Twisting his neck, Equius saw that they had grabbed the twins as well, keeping them well apart. They sparked and fizzled impotently, hurling insults in east-trollish so vile that even though Equius could not understand them, his ears still burned. The bats seemed unaffected, so he blushed for them. 'Cao ni zu zong shi ba dai' indeed.

"You will release me at once beast-man." Equius announced, tone brooking no argument.

"I am afraid not," intoned the ancient one. He had a younger sounding voice than one would think, with a far more cultured accent. "If I did so you would fall to your death."

Equius looked down; they were so high that even his keen night-vision could not see the floor. "Very well. Then you shall set me down gently on the ground and then release me at once."

"I am afraid not," he repeated.

"You will do as I say," Equius said authoritatively.

Once again, there came an "I am afraid not," with the exact same tone and inflection as the first time. Odd.

"Yes, you will!" Equius boomed.

"I am afraid not." It occurred to Equius that this line of inquiry would go nowhere very quickly. A thought occurred. "Do you truly speak, or merely imitate?"

Ignoring his question, the beast-man said "behold our greatest treasure." Equius looked straight ahead and saw nothing. Likely as not, the bats had even keener eyesight in the dark than Equius himself however, so he said nothing. Sure enough, within a few minutes, a shape began to emerge from the dark. It looked to be some massive arch, though as time passed he saw that it was a pair of statues linking arms, though he could not quite determine the faces. Their eyes were lit by bonfires. And time continued to pass. They flew for what seemed to be hours, and Equius grew quite cramped and asked for his posture to be corrected. Three times, about an hour apart, he heard something like the sound of a pipe organ playing. The twins had grown hoarse in their shouting, and then silent, letting out only an occasional whimper.

Though he had known the grandeur of both Derse and Prospit, even their mighty gates paled, at least in terms of pure scale, compared to the statues. No, it was one massive structure, and suspended between them there was a face. A clock face, but not like any clock he had ever seen before. An enormous clock that divided time in some obscure way he couldn't tell, with two massive wheels in constant motion rather than hands, each one depicting a menagerie of fantastical beasts, picked out in some vaguely luminescent stone. A ram, a two headed giant, three minotaurs, et cetera. It occurred to him that different combinations of animals gave the time.

Finally, they entered the massive vault, and Equius saw that the system of caves was but one of five that led to this enormous clock. What's more, he found that he could finally distinguish the forms of the statues, though he'd been too preoccupied with the clock-face to notice. A pair of identical and beautiful trollish women, ram-horned and wild-haired, equipped with a pair of butterfly wings each; stonework so delicate it could not have been crafted by any mortal hand, much less by these new beast-men. It must have been some chthonic pagan deity, though by the cut of their clothing the statues might have depicted the Maid. Though the oddest thing was that despite the stern expression, they resembled his darling Aradia down to the laugh-lines that betrayed their grimness.

* * *

"Nak," said Willoughby, conversationally.

"I don't know either," said Eridan, lazily stirring his drink. The two of them were relaxing in chairs set right next to a cave entrance high on the rocky green island, overlooking the soft white and green sand below. The greenstone island was very porous, allowing natural light into nearly every chamber, but this was by far the biggest and best 'window'. "She disappeared before I could get a good look at her. Pretty eyes though." He giggled to himself like a schoolgirl.

Willoughby scratched his forehead. "Nak, nak?"

"Hmm," Eridan was pulled out of his reverie. "No, I have spoken to her again. These past few nights she's led me into a small chamber like a confessional and talked to me through the screen. She has a wonderful voice too," he sighed; it was flavored with an accent from a country that had never existed, or so she said. They had talked for hours on end. He'd wanted to ask her important questions, like who she was and how she'd been able to help him, and if she'd be willing to part with one of her treasures, but mostly she asked questions. About his life, but especially about his family. She seemed especially amused by them, for some reason.

The first conversation had been rather awkward, of course.

"Who are you?" he'd asked before even setting himself down properly.

She'd laughed a tinkling, aristocratic laugh. "A friend."

Eridan huffed. "Why aren't I dead?"

"A little bit of the panacea," she said brightly. "Medicine that can heal almost any injury. I was entrusted with the only one."

Eridan lit up. Now that was a treasure worth braving the desert for! "Would you be willing to part with it?"

The tinkling laugh again. "I don't think you'd be willing to give me my price, dear."

"I'm very wealthy," Eridan assured.

At this she'd sighed deeply. "What use have I for money? But no; I'll tell you later, if I think you might be receptive. Best not to scare you off before I get to know you better."

Eridan had tried to peer through the screen but he could glimpse nothing. Irritated, he asked, "Why did you save my life?"

"I couldn't stand the thought of you dead, of course!" Her words had sent chills up his spine and he fell silent for a long while.

Raised from his stupor by a curious 'nak,' Eridan suddenly smacked the crocodile in the shoulder, scraping his knuckles on the crocodile's ruby scales. "I think I'm in love with her."

Willoughby gasped and started nakking hurriedly. Eridan scowled. "Fuck you! Don't tell me how to feel! No, you're rushing into things!"

"NAK!" Willoughby roared.

Eridan recoiled so hard he fell from his chair. "How dare you?" He rose to his feet, hand reaching for his sidearm. "There is no conceivable way that what you just said is even remotely true." He drew the pistol. "You apologize or I will swear to God I will make a purse out of you and give it to my lady."

The crocodile squinted his one eye defiantly. "Nak." Eridan pistol whipped him in the snout and threw him out the opening in the rock. The sand below made a sound something like a splash. His work done, Eridan wiped off his hands. The little shit was resilient and would be back the next morning, just like the past two nights.

Still, he thought, pausing, what he had said _this_ time….

No. He couldn't believe that his lovely patroness was just a monster in disguise. It was ludicrous. Obviously.

* * *

Two hours later Eridan was running around the cave panicking, frantically sticking his head out the many windows and looking for Willoughby's scarlet form. He would slap himself, talk himself down, recline in a chair (there was always a comfortable chair handy and he never once questioned it), and berate himself for doubting the integrity of his patroness who was surely a kind and beautiful as well as powerful woman.

And as soon as he was comfortable, the panic would fight its way back up into his brain through his stomach. He would scratch, shift in his seat, snap at himself to get a grip, and within minutes he would be up again shouting for Willoughby and looking for an exit. There were hundreds of exits of course, but they all led to scalding heat and powder so fine he could never hope to cross it. He stared at the desert and the still smoking wreckage of the pirate ships off in the distance. "How the fuck does she even get here!?" he shouted, firing off his gun at random while screaming incoherently.

When he first came to, his wounds miraculously healed and covered in some sort of bluish slime, his only thought had been to find his rescuer. He'd looked everywhere for her, filled with an intense yearning to see the face that went with those eyes and that voice. He was certain that if he did, he would finally be happy. The cave had enough chambers to serve as a middling-large mansion and was decorated with fine Alternian weavings and a multitude of religious artifacts. Books, statues, reliquaries, from all manner of sects and faiths, even the heathen beast-man religions were represented equally with the Heroes and Nobles and the pentagrammaton, and even a few chalk drawings that he guessed she'd made herself. He'd considered this a sign of being cultured.

But no, now Willoughby had infected his brain with his stupid mind-virus, the clever, clever bastard.

There was only one solution; he would have to confront her. Eridan smacked his head on a pillar a few times and then sat down against it as a purple bruise formed across his face. Then he loaded his gun and waited. He felt awful for being driven to this, but it was only way. Hopefully she would just laugh it off, reveal herself to be as beautiful as her voice, and tell him what a silly git he's been.

The sunset seemed to set fire to the desert, turning the silver-white sand into a blazing inferno of scarlet and burnt-orange. Eridan paid it no mind. She would be coming soon. The air became suddenly charged as if presaging a lightning storm and the cave seemed greener for an instant, accompanied by a pounding like the sound of massive wings. Wings indeed.

He made his way to the confessional but ignored the door. There was only one door, but she always made her way into the second chamber. Somehow. Eridan raised his gun, gave it a menacing click, and said—

Nothing, because the wall of the confessional swung open on a secret hinge at that exact moment, revealing a pretty greenblood in a suit. "Hello!" she announced cheerfully, causing Eridan to jump, tripping over his cape and falling on his ass.

Despite her snow-white hair and manner of dress, she seemed to embody the platonic ideal of trollish beauty; long curly lashes in a charming shade of lime, big liquid eyes that were almost, but not quite, entirely filled in with blood-pigment, ears that were very slightly pointed, skin the color of polished lead, a glowing green blush blooming across her cheeks, thin lips stretched over a mouthful of delicately pointed fangs. Her horns were long and curved upwards in a lazy spiral like an oryx's. Eridan found himself grinning stupidly and stood up, trying and failing to look menacing. "Tell me who you are," he demanded. "Really."

She pouted. "Now here I thought you were frightened I was some terrible monster. Shouldn't you be relieved that I'm just a pretty girl instead?" She stood up and strode towards him. Eridan took a step back. "You know, I really am the injured party in this situation. You've broken my one rule and I should probably just fly off to my mother's, heartbroken, and leave you to rot." She paused and considered, finger on her lip. "Or turn you into an owl. I always forget how the story goes."

Sweet merciful Sufferer she was cute—Eridan slapped himself in the face. She was close enough now for him to see that what he had perceived as a blush was in fact a pair of spiral markings on her cheeks, and the sign on her lapel didn't even tangentially resemble an Old High Trollish character. "Trolls don't fly," he said. "And they don't explode pirate ships with rainbow fire. I know; I've tried. And I've never in my life seen horns like _that_!"

She smiled and pointed at her horns. "Well you caught me!" The air crackled and they disappeared in a flash of green light. "Did you like them? I designed them myself. I always wanted horns, see, but to be honest they are quite uncomfortable. I only wear them when I go out, or if I'm entertaining."

Trembling, Eridan dropped his gun, made the sign of the Sufferer. He was barely able to choke out a question. "What the hell are you?"

"Now that was very rude love," she said, crossing her arms. "Generally speaking, when you court a girl you don't make inquiry as to her species or go around aiming guns in her house, not that you could harm me even if you were so inclined." Assuming a faux-offended manner, she continued. "I however, unlike a certain Grecian deity who found himself in a very similar situation, am willing to actually put work into this relationship."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Eridan shouted.

She giggled. "I heard you talking with your friend earlier. I wasn't eavesdropping mind; it's just very difficult for the omniscient _not_ to hear private conversations in their own home—"

There was a menacing click and Eridan turned to see Willoughby, covered in sand, holding a pistol that was easily half his length. "NAK!" he swore, leveling the gun at the girl and pulling the trigger. At that exact moment, it flashed with green and yellow lightning and seemed to expand until it filled the room and was suddenly gone, all in a single instant. The crocodile proceeded to flip the fuck out, running around in circles and unleashing a stream of truly virile naks.

The girl giggled. "Oh, you really need to stop thinking of me in such impersonal terms," she said, turning back to Eridan. She extended her hand. "I'm Calliope."

Unthinkingly, he took her hand and kissed it. "Oh, well that's one thing about this world is how chivalrous everyone is, even you!" She—Calliope—was visibly flustered now. Well, thought Eridan, at least both of them were uncomfortable now. Still, what had he expected? Some powerful sorceress who wanted to look like a troll he could deal with. It didn't change anything, surely.

She took his hand and pulled him away into another chamber away from the reptilian's crisis. The sun had set quickly and but for a line of orange on the horizon, it was now nighttime. He could see that there were stars sewn into her clothing, though they didn't move when she did, and yellow-green sparks danced in her hair. Something flashed in her hand in that crackling green way, and then she was holding a large cube of gelatinous blue slime. "These were once actually quite common," she said, nervously. "But this is the only one left. Gods require so much more of it than mortals though; it'll last you a long time."

Eridan gulped. "What do you want for it, Calliope?" The word was alien to his mouth, perhaps another relic of sunken lands from infinity ago. It was lovely all the same.

She stared at him with those big liquid eyes. "Would you like to stay here with me? Forever?"

Completely ignoring his fear from before, he immediately breathed out a desperate yes. "Only, I must to give the treasure to Dave. He needs it. I doubt he'll have found anything as wonderful as I have." He found himself slipping into a more aristocratic dialect, which had never come easy to him before.

"Um, before you agree," she had a fascinating way with her Us, he thought, "You need to see something." She paused, looking down at the floor. "It may just change your mind about this."

Trying to sound heroic, Eridan said, "I doubt anything could change the way I feel about you." There was a loud nak of irritation from the next room. "No Willoughby _you're_ a cliché! A fuckin' one-eyed pirate? I mean come on! Yes, you are a fuckin' pirate jackass you stole a ship!"

Calliope laughed, though it sounded a bit forced to Eridan's ears. There was a glimmer of lime green at the corner of her eye. "I'm going to show you my true form now," she said, wiping it away. "Promise not to scream."

For an instant, her form became obscured by green and yellow lightning, expanding until she seemed to take up everything, everywhere, and collapsed back into itself. Except something else was standing there now.

Shrouded in iridescent white wings crackling with green lightning, Eridan could barely make it out. He saw a tall, powerfully-built figure with deep green skin. With a sense of finality, Calliope threw her wings open, filling the room with light. Eridan stepped back. Her hands and feet bore heavy claws built for rending, dismembering prey, and her skull-like head bore a mouthful of vicious tusks.

There wasn't a single trace of hair anywhere on her body, he noted, except for her long curling eyelashes. Calliope's big liquid doe-eyes were just the same as before, he saw, and her green skin was spangled with stars that did not move when she did. Her body had seemed androgynous at first, but he could still make out subtle signs of femininity. Calliope's skin gave off a rainbow colored luminescence, as if she were burning, a source of light and power. Eridan laughed a little to himself.

"Am I that terribly ugly?" she asked.

"No," he said.

* * *

The City of Wrath was magnificent for something that had been built by mortal hands. Painstakingly assembled from cut stone, it expertly mimicked the gothic spires of Prospit. Though it had been abandoned some three thousand years, most of it was remarkably well preserved. Karkat and Vriska marveled at the proud structures, the pointed arches like blades of space, the monstrous gargoyles bigger than grown men, and the barbed and serrated spires that carved at the sky. Every stone was a work of art, its every surface engraved with some scene or animal, or a verse in the enigmatic pre-contact human language that has been lost to time.

The City of Wrath was silent. The weight of three thousand years seemed to crush all sound but for the fluttering of angel wings on the sea breeze. As they progressed towards the city center, signs of the calamity that had driven out all life became more frequent. Rusty stains on the ground that spoke of ancient violence, shattered stones and fallen buildings, signs of fires, stacks of weapons and shreds of clothing, everything remarkably well preserved, as if even the forces of decay had been killed here. There wasn't a single sign that anything had lived here for thirty centuries. No plants, no animals, no insects, and no bodies. Nothing here but for the softly singing voices of the angels hundreds of feet above.

The City of Wrath was a dead place. Death walked the streets with heavier tread than any angelic inhabitant. Somehow, Karkat knew that the city would never be habitable again, even if someone were to wipe out the angelic infestation and flood the city with people. Nothing could grow here and nothing could live here because nothing _would_ live here. The very idea of living in the city brought to mind the idea of building a house out of bones. This place was just the crumbling skeleton of a city, a corpse of a civilization, and the only things that lived among corpses were scavengers. Karkat looked up and saw two angels, circling above the City of Wrath like vultures, their long, whip-like tails fluttering behind them. Could something eat an abstract concept? Like what separated a city from a pile of stones?

In their four hour journey, the angels ignored Karkat and Vriska, and indeed they ignored the city, mostly circling the high crag to the east, and occasionally looping back over it to check on their young. Both the trolls were wearing hats made of Karkat's aluminum scraps. The angels could use any part of their body as an eye, of course, but this provided some protection from their psychic assaults at least. They had left their riding-beasts outside the city, tethered to a small oasis. Vriska assured him that the angels only devoured sentient creatures. It seemed her dip in the goop had given her some understanding of the monsters.

The eggs were large enough for both Karkat and Vriska to lay down in comfortably without even touching, and the same pearly white color as everything to do with the monsters. They had been imbedded, seemingly at random, in surfaces throughout the city. "They need stone to incubate their eggs," Vriska whispered as the stared one pearly dome peeking out from a third-storey window, where it had been forcibly pushed through the brick by means unknown. There were at least a dozen others like it on the same street, half-buried in the cobblestones or under piles of rubble, and one could be seen imbedded atop the highest tower of what they assumed was the royal palace. "If they try to lay them in the sand like animals the babies are born deformed or die outright."

Karkat nodded, hand on his sickle. He seemed far warier of them than Vriska did, even though she'd had the worse experience. There was a sudden flash of green and a loud bang, and a gun as long as Karkat's forearm fell out of the sky and shot one of the angel eggs, cracking it open with a sound like exploding glass as a river of milky pale fluid spilled onto the street, the deific fetus shrieking its death-throes into the trolls' minds. A pair of angels swooped down from the sky, hurling obscenities with their minds and beams of burning light from their heads. Vriska ran up to the gun, picked it up, and shot one full on the face. Karkat grabbed her and ran just as she started cranking the handle.

"Let me go! I hate them! I want them dead," she screamed. A blast of white light tore open the ground in front of them and she came back to her senses. Karkat looked down into the hole. It had probably been intended as a sewer, but after millennia of neglect it had flooded with sea-water. Above, three more angels dove in out of the sun, singing a delightful ditty in their language, helpfully accompanied by images of tearing off strips of trollflesh by the handful and _braiding it into a noose—_

Karkat and Vriska looked at each other, and jumped.

Karkat felt a terrible sting that seemed to go right to his brain as his damaged horn hit the water that drove the breath out of him and left him stunned and disoriented. For an awful moment he felt as if everything were swirling around him and wondered if they had jumped into a whirlpool.

Suddenly he was yanked away by a fearsome grip and he lashed out, hitting something hard and sharp—

Then he could breathe and Vriska was shouting at him, quite literally blue in the face. "You paranoid fucker you almost chipped my horn! Underwater!" They were floating in water about ten feet deep. Land trolls are not generally strong swimmers, but it was seawater, calm but for a slight current. "They'll leave us alone here," Vriska continued. "They don't like seawater. It can short out their powers."

"Is that why the other one died? But then why the hell do they live so close to the ocean?" Karkat snapped.

Vriska looked at him as if he were an idiot. "Because they can fly indefinitely." Karkat conceded the point.

They swam with the current a while, following a brick tunnel that seemed to be slowly but surely filling with water. Vriska was leading due to Karkat's sense of direction being muddled by his injury. His angel-bloodstained sickle provided a hint of light. The angels, having lost visual contact with them, were searching for the trolls confusedly; occasionally Karkat's mind was touched by a shriek of concern or a disturbing image, but they couldn't lock on through the layers of stone and aluminum, and he figured they were unwilling to blast too many random holes in the floor so near to their eggs. He and Vriska were probably safe.

The current eventually took them to a place where the water touched the tunnel's surface; it had not been filling with water, it had been at an angle. They took a deep breath and dove, prepared to swim until their lungs gave out. There was no need. The tunnel let out after a few feet into a wide stone chamber held up by pointed arches, the vaulted ceiling above seeming like the ribcage of a massive animal.

Now they swam against the current. At regular intervals, they could see smaller brick tunnels identical to their own branching off to service the rest of the dead city. As they swam, it seemed that the brick tunnels were higher out of the water, until they reached one that was completely dry. "The city's sinking!" Karkat realized as he pulled himself out of the water into a sitting position.

Vriska nodded. "Stacking several tons of stone on a sandy beach will do that." She wrung out her hair and produced a water-tight leather tube. Inside was the map. "Okay, according to Mindfang, the treasure is hidden in the Grotto of Despair—"

"Sounds fucking wonderful," Karkat intoned.

"Shut up Vantas," Vriska said absently. "The only way to get there is through the underground part of the city, where we are of course. Now, the stupid thing about this map is that it's just a general map of the region," she said, flicking it with three fingers, "but we do have written instructions on how to get there."

"I know already," Karkat pointed out. "You translated this shit for me like a month ago, remember? You just love hearing yourself talk, don't you, you narcissist?"

"Wow you are such a charmer, I feel so appreciated," she deadpanned. "The tunnels on this side here go to another identical chamber, which should be mostly dry. Both of those let out into the ocean, but the entrance to the grotto is in between them somewhere."

Karkat nodded while yawning exaggeratedly. "I just love hearing things I already know. It's the best fucking thing." Vriska slugged him in the arm.

The pair trudged on through the tunnel. This time Karkat was in the lead, holding his sickle in front of him as there was no water to reflect its light. With his damaged balance, navigating the slimy, inclined hole studded with fossilized refuse was no picnic, but when he stumbled Vriska was there to shove him back to his feet.

Eventually, they reached the vaulted chamber. The floor here had cracked right down the middle and jagged stone shards taller than either of them reached towards the far wall at a forty-five degree angle like vicious claws. Vriska clambered up the side of one as nimbly as a spider. When Karkat tried to follow, he smashed his face against the stone, spurting blood from his nose. He growled, smashing his fist against it. "It's this stupid fucking horn!" he shouted. "I'm basically useless now. You know what Vriska," he said, leaning against the stone, "You should just go and get the fucking thing. I'll wait for you here. On second thought, I can make my own way back—"

Something coarse and slightly heavy thudded onto his head, then slid off onto his shoulder. The magic rope. "You are such a fucking wiggler sometimes, Karkat!" Vriska snapped. In a very poor imitation of his voice, she said, "'Oh no, I'm a mutant, Jade doesn't like me, they took my knighthood, my horn is broken,' fuck you I was almost cannibalized by a giant retarded clown and then nearly drowned in cosmic egg-yolk that was well past its expiration date and I barely even have nightmares anymore, so just grab the fucking rope or I'll slit your goddamn throat." She was wearing a vicious smile, as if to indicate that she was only half-joking.

Karkat grabbed the rope and she hauled him up. Carefully, he lowered himself to the ground while she jumped off the pinnacle, touching down on wet sand; just as Vriska had claimed, the ground underneath the stone was just tightly packed sand, finally giving way under the weight of an entire city after all these centur—

Vriska grabbed Karkat by the neck and violently threw him down onto the sand, sitting on his back, hand to his mouth. He twisted and struggled, trying to throw her off, until he chanced to see her face, nearly white with fear—no, it was drenched with white light. Her hair was standing up like an angry black cloud, and points of blue light were beginning to dance on the edges of her aluminum hat.

A little in front of Karkat, there was a space between two of the shards, and he could see something massive and pearly white standing on the other side. Part of it split open and an ugly white dome slid out, turning this way and that. An eye. This was an angel, but unlike any angel they had yet seen. Vriska slipped off him and squeezed under the stone, motioning for him to follow.

He crawled in after, looking up as he did. The angel—creature—whatever, was taller than the stones, if tall was the appropriate word. It seemed to be a massive circle. Not a perfectly smooth one, mind; it seemed as if there were a humanoid form near the top, or rather the impression of one, muscled chest and featureless face seeming as if they were trying to press themselves out of the strange, living wheel. Its arms were thrown back, he noticed, but they morphed into a big, crosshatched pattern—Ah, like wings. Karkat remembered thinking that the eggs were far too large to have been laid by the creatures he'd fought. He squeezed against Vriska.

The angel-thing retreated, and both trolls breathed a sigh of relief just as it ramped itself over the hedge of jagged stones. Karkat and Vriska crawled away as fast as they could, until they found a gap big enough to crawl through. Once on the other side, Vriska produced the big pistol that had fallen from the sky earlier and aimed it back through the gap. Karkat grabbed her arm and shook his head emphatically, but she slapped it away and took aim—

There was nothing there.

It smashed through a stone to their right at great speed and came rolling towards them. Vriska turned and shot it, the heavy gun blasting a fist sized hole in the thing's edge, causing it to wobble off course and slam into a wall.

Karkat wasted no time, resisting the urge to shout as he swung the war-sickle overhand, lodging the blade deep into the thing's side. He saw now that there were dozens of similar humanoid impressions all over the thing. Did angels…compress themselves into new shapes and forms? He pulled out the sickle and hacked into the thing again. Vriska meanwhile, had pulled out her boating knife and driven it up to the hilt in the angel's disgusting eyeball, making sure the stream of sickly white blood didn't touch her skin, then cranked the pistol as fast as she could. As soon as the bullet clicked into place she stuck into the now vacant eye-socket and pulled the trigger.

It had neglected to use its psychic powers at all until now, unleashing a horrific wail that buzzed against Karkat's brain like a swarm of hornets. His scalp grew horribly warm and he realized that his hat was crackling with blue and white sparks, just like Vriska's.

"Let's see how you like it motherfucker!" she shouted, just as her nest of foil actually caught fire. She ignored it and touched her forehead, face contorting into a wretched mask that Karkat would have entitled 'boundless hatred' had he found it buried at an archaeological site, before burying it again for fear of whatever curse was sure to inhabit it.

Still, what was she hoping to accomplish? It wasn't as if she could control the angels—

Vriska could not control the angels. But she could give them aneurisms, or so Karkat decided when it gushed a quick but violent spurt of blood from every orifice and collapsed.

He reached over and plucked the bits of burning scrap from Vriska's hair, which was fortunately still wet enough not to have caught fire. She was making a noise somewhere between laughing and crying. "I got some on me," she explained. There was a gleam of pearlescent white on her throat. Karkat fished out a very grubby handkerchief and wiped it off very thoroughly before taking her arm and leading her over to a stone that looked comfortable to sit on. After twenty minutes, she declared herself ready to proceed.

"Wait," said Karkat, putting his aluminum hat on her head. She hugged him, so quickly that he could barely register what had happened. They walked in silence a while.

"Hey Karkat," she said, "I've been thinking. You don't really hate me, do you?"

He sputtered. "Of course I do! How could you even ask that?"

Vriska snickered. "Come off it Karkat, you're too good a person to properly hate anybody, at least in _that_ way."

"Fuck that, I will show you what a great kismesis I am," said. Then he grabbed Vriska, spun her around, and kissed her.

"Are you happy now," she murmured when he pulled back.

"No," he said, removing his jacket. "We are going to have, like, crazy hatesex right now. All of it." He threw off his chainmail, which clattered to the stones with a satisfying clink. "All of the hatesex," he elaborated.

Vriska raised an eyebrow. "Somehow I doubt that."

"Was that a jab at my virility?" Karkat said, pointing an accusatory finger, "Because that just makes me hate you _more_—"

Vriska slapped away his hand as it drifted towards her. "This is just the adrenaline talking Karkat. And possibly all the brain-damage finally catching up to you."

Karkat was not listening to her as he was busily trying to remove his trousers, which were sticking to his legs due to the seawater. "Stupid piece of shit bastard pants—"

"Karkat, I think you're pale for me."

"Black as _night_ babe—"

"Because I'm pale for you."

Karkat regarded her very carefully. She had withdrawn into herself, as if ashamed at having revealed so much, which was stupid as they were ostensibly already in a relationship. But, aside from bickering they had rarely acted like kismeses. Bluh, did kismeses even go on trips together? He'd known since they'd first met that this girl needed someone to keep her from committing mass murder. But was he up to it?

"You're not just saying this because you've finally realized how desperately you need a Moirail, right?" he asked.

Vriska made a noise at the ground. "No dumbass," she smirked, not looking at him. "It has to be you. No one else knows me well enough, and no one else would stick around after finding out. Well, except John, but he's firmly in the red corner." Turning a fierce blue, she added. "And there's no one I'd rather be shooshed and papped by."

Karkat nodded. "Praise the fucking Sufferer," he said, and hugged her.

* * *

Author's Note: I'm so happy to be going to ComicCon that I updated twice in a day. You are pleased.

The Euquius segment was meant to be one piece chronicling his entire adventure, but now it'll be two. The prostitutes are in fact high quality courtesans, like trollish geishas, hence the fancy makeup. They were intended to invoke the Aradiabots, of course, but this setting has no robots, so they are clearly real trolls with names. Let's call them Maaraa and Rae-Rae. This isn't going to come up in-story, of course, or else I wouldn't put it here.

The Eridan segment is meant to be an allegory for the fandom's relationship to Calliope as it developed. Obviously. I am so clever. But honestly, aren't those two made for each other, or at least desperate enough to settle?

So, we've finally caught up, I have no more existing chapters of this story. I'm working on the next one, but I'm also going to start uploading some other stories I've partially written. Would you be more interested in a Zelda: Wind Waker fusion, or an AU where trolls are android companions that fight each other for fun and profit?


	8. Disciples

John had gotten a job at a metal working factory, a low building, newly built, which is to say that it was nearly a hundred years old. It was made of irregular river stones, dozens of shades of yellow and tawny brown, and looked a bit like a church without spires from the outside. Inside it was cramped and ugly, or at least the working floor was. The offices upstairs were very nice and well appointed with art and fine furniture. The higher ups had watched him look around when he first arrived for the interview and probably felt very self-satisfied at seeing this rube gawk at their riches. He was laughing inside, of course.

John's employers were dubious at first because of his lack of an arm, but he'd always been unusually strong, and augmented by his newly ascended Breath powers, there was little reason not to take him. His exact job was not smelting or smithing or anything glamorously dangerous and physical, however. He ran a machine that pressed things into sheets of metal. For now it was the Dersite banner being stamped onto tin plates, to later be painted purple and riveted to buildings. It made him angry. However, the machine was literally called a cliché, so that almost made it worth it.

He was not working the machine at this exact moment however. He was being glared at by a very surly co-worker. "Uh, first of all, you're awful and I hate you. I just want to get that out of the way right now—um, why are you laughing at me?" John was not in fact, laughing at the big Taurus, whose name was, appropriately enough, Tavros (of course, Tavros was boyishly slim compared to Equius, but then so were most trumpet-beasts). He was a full head taller than John, and quite a bit wider, though not necessarily more muscular. Tavros had a rack of horns so big John wondered how he could move around at all, but he wasn't laughing at that. He had a heavy iron nose-ring, presumably to make him look tough, but John wasn't laughing at that either (well, not anymore). He certainly wasn't laughing at that incredibly unfitting voice, high, quiet, and cracked like a young teenager's, starting and stopping without rhyme or reason. _Certainly_ not that.

No, John was laughing at the way that all the metal dust in the factory reflected and refracted the blue spectrum into a goddamn psychedelic light-show the likes of which have not been seen by mortal eyes until now. His senses were heightening with every passing day, particularly his perception of the color blue, as if the crippling of his body had expanded his spirit.

He reached out with his one hand and flicked Tavros's lapel, releasing a cascade of the stuff that swirled and floated in a luminescent—

John returned to lucidity when the air currents informed him a trollish fist flying straight for his face, and shoved himself back with a burst of blue just in time. The troll took another swing, and John curled the Breath around his fist, catching it in a web of blue only he could see. He put his hand on the fist so as to not give himself away, and shoved hard, knocking the troll to the floor. "You human," he struggled for a word, "motherfucker! I hate you!"

John smiled. "Are you requisitioning me?"

Tavros flushed a deep chocolaty brown that stood out in high contrast to all the ambient blue. John snickered. Tavros pushed himself up, backing away to his machine. "You humans all think that just because a troll doesn't like you," he said, picking up an iron bar he'd been shaping, "it means he's trying to, to, _fuck_ you—"

"So to be clear, that's a no?" John said, rubbing his hand through his newly bleached hair. It felt so odd being blond. Tavros hurled the bar as if it were a spear; John side-stepped and the thing embedded itself into a wooden support beam. Wooden beams in a metal-working factory. John would have to come down hard on this place when he was king. "It's too bad," John said, "I'm finding it kind of emotionally fulfilling to make you angry."

Tavros blushed harder and hurled another bar, which John dodged once again. He became vaguely aware that he was using the Breath to push himself around. Once it had taken all of his effort to do it; now there was a perpetual, Breath-augmented spring in his step. It was becoming increasingly difficult to stay focused, however. Only a few days ago he'd been able to walk in here and work without incident and now he was spazzing out about metal flakes—

Speaking of flaking, another iron bar whizzed past his face on the right side, and he felt a sudden, sobering chill. What the fuck was he doing? He could get killed doing this. John looked all around, at the low stone ceiling barely held up by _wooden_ beams, the dozens of machines, the faces, trollish and human, but mostly Carapacian staring at him, some angry, some eager, some frightened. He felt he'd learned all he could from working here. It was time to move on. Completely unceremoniously, John turned on his heel and left.

He stumbled as he reached the outside, seeing a cart driving by. The back of it was covered with a white sheet, but a tiny foot was sticking out the end of it. A plague had hit Prospit just recently. Well, the numbers weren't high enough yet to count as a plague. An illness. People would just waste away to nothing, displaying symptoms like anemia combined with a certain kind of madness. Hallucinations, phantom pains, and hearing things no one else can hear. The disease took people's minds, leaving behind pale, thin corpses.

Even so, once he cart dwindled into nothing in the distance, the streets of Prospit were a comforting sight; there was very little blue anywhere in the city proper, except for those awful, loud Dersite banners that seemed to be trying to have their way with his corneas. But they were few and far between here in the slums, so in general he felt he could breathe properly. He took the long way back to the home he shared with WV, as John had started calling him, not wanting to face the jittery creature after having so suddenly quit the job he'd fought so hard to get.

John _had_ learned something, he thought. He learned that the people viewed the change in regime with displeasure, but not open antagonism. The royal family had been respected, even liked, but not beloved, likely due to its isolation from the people. Excepting a few carriage rides and parades, he had hardly ever left the palace, and he hadn't ever complained, not really, because the palace was a city unto itself. But now he wondered how long the Regent had been in Derse's pocket, and wished he'd left him alive. To interrogate. He wasn't feeling guilty. A king's duty was to execute traitors.

Navigating the maze of streets and alleyways was not the ordeal it had been even a few days ago. Although the towers and buildings were tightly knit here in the slums, rising to the sky and obscuring the sun, it wasn't dark. The buildings reflected gentle golden light wherever he went, and there were no shadows, except in doorways and window frames, crouching in dark alleys and hiding amongst the gothic bulk. Could this city simply have a single, solitary building the emphasized function over form? Everything was a work of art, and only the poor state of the cobbles and the thousand-thousand lines of drying laundry suspended hundreds of feet up like a spider's web gave indication that this was a place where people lived. John found that all the yellow was a trap for his mind as much as the blue was, but a different kind.

Because even with his enhanced senses, he still wound up taking the dark turn into a dead-end alley. When he turned, there was Tavros.

John slapped his forehead. "Look, I'm sorry. I'm…having trouble being myself lately. I had a pretty bad accident, if you couldn't tell, and it messed me up. I hardly even know what I'm saying anymore. Everything is so _fucking_ blue—"

"You used the Breath," Tavros announced, eyes wide. "You, uh, threw me around with it. I could see wisps of blue coming from your feet when you moved. I can, uh, actually, see them right now," John looked down and muttered a curse before dismissing the Breath and falling the half-inch to his feet.

"No I didn't," said John authoritatively. "You're hallucinating. It's all the metal dust in the air, it's bad for you. You should complain to the city. Start a petition. We'll get that place shut down."

"Teach me how to use it," said Tavros, a determined look on his face. "Or I'll expose you. You're the, uh, the prince, aren't you? I'll tell everyone."

"I could just kill you instead," John said, trying his best to look menacing. "It'll be easy." The air all around him shifted and started to rotate, faster and faster until it formed a whirling cyclone, buffeting Tavros with yellow sand and streaks of blue. John, in the center, was unaffected. "Do you even understand all the things I could do to you right now?"

Nervously, Tavros said, "Are you requisitioning me?"

John snorted, and the cyclone dissipated. "Okay that was good. What do you want to know?"

* * *

There is a house in Prospit which is older than the city. It is dwarfed by the magnificent spires and domes, nigh on insignificant next to them with its pitiful one story, its construction emphasizing function over form, leaving it ugly and stunted, a tiny blight on the great golden apple, yet it seemed to cast an impossible shadow over them. Every year which passed in the golden city crept, dying, into this little black house, so that over time it became a cemetery, a coffin for the countless centuries long passed since its creation.

The duality amused Sollux. That's why he'd bought it.

Well, not the only reason. How could he dare call himself a Gemini if he didn't have at least two? What most people didn't know was that the city extended as far downward as it did upward, and the little black tomb of a house was the only way in.

Sollux took his staff in hand. The sleek black rod was topped with the sign of his aspect, that monstrous alien skull with the dead, empty eyes. It thrummed with the steady, inexorable power of itself. Then he straightened his black cowl, taking care to hide the iron collar around his neck. It had been welded shut, and could never be broken. But he was free now. The lights all dimmed and a trapdoor opened. He descended, leaving the house in darkness.

The light of his eyes glinted off the ugly orange stones of the stairway. The electric charge that he built up when using his powers spread to his clothes, and his cloak, a green so dark it was almost black, cut like the wings of some enormous insect, spread out behind him as if ready to take flight. He could if he wanted to. But it would be best to keep her waiting.

* * *

Jade sat on a stone plinth. The room was ancient and thick with dust and the cobwebs of long dead spiders. Her little green flame was the only source of light, and the effect it had on the orange stone all around was quite hideous. She wondered what time it was. There was no way to tell down here with no sun and no clocks. She'd always been terrible with keeping time however. Perhaps she was early? She tried to expand the flame, but she could never muster up the same level of power that she'd exhibited on that first day when she left the palace.

Silver mounting glinting in the emerald light, her father's blunderbuss seemed like some ghostly instrument. Jade had not been able to fire it once. She'd hoped that with it, she'd be able to get the people on her side. But it hadn't been enough, not without the ability to use it. The people had seen her holding the gun she couldn't use, her crudely chopped hair, and general disheveledness, and thought the kingdom lost. They needed a true leader, not a scraggly aspiring witch.

But _he_ could teach her. Sollux, the former palace mage. No one had known where he'd run off to after the fall of the palace, but after nearly a month of searching, he'd come to her. And now, here she was. Waiting.

Jade might have fallen asleep before he showed up, because her green light was entirely replaced with purple. She stiffened, having associated the color with her enemies for so long, but then noticed red and blue at the edges of her vision, and realized the color was a blending of the two coming from the same source. Jade leapt out of her seat. "Sollux!" she shouted, running to her old acquaintance, arms outstretched.

"No," he said, just before the hug made contact. She stopped, looking vaguely disappointed. "I'm sorry," she said, "it's just nice to see a friendly face after all this time."

"I guess," he muttered. "Let's cut the small-talk though. What can you do?"

Jade cupped her hands and concentrated. Her hair built up a charge and began standing up, coiling and twisting into a black halo. Finally, a ball of sparks exploded into being, and another green flame grew into shape between her palms. "I was able to do so much more on the first day," she muttered. "It was much bigger and there was lightning and stuff. Now all I can do is this sick looking thing."

"No it's good," said Sollux. "Green fire's actually much hotter than other colors."

"I know that," Jade snapped. "I'm not stupid! But I want to be stronger."

"Okay," said Sollux. "The first thing you need to do is sit the fuck down because you are way too close to me right now."

Jade realized that she was holding her flame only a few inches from Sollux's face, and she giggled nervously and sat back down. "So, teach me to control fire!"

Sollux groaned. "Your aspect isn't fire," he snapped. "You're Space. It's actually one of the most versatile aspects, and way better than a lesser power like fire."

Jade raised an eyebrow. "How can you tell?"

"I'm Doom," Sollux explained. At Jade's blank expression, he swore under his breath and said, "Doom means destiny."

"I thought Light meant Destiny," said Jade.

"It does," he acknowledged, "in a slightly different way. All of the Aspects interact with each other on a fundamental level, and overlap in mysterious ways." With the end of his rod he drew a twelve pointed star in the dust. At each point, there were some vague squiggles.

"What are those?" asked Jade. "Is it trollish?'

"Are you stupid? It's the symbols of the aspects!"

Jade stuck her tongue out at him. "It's not my fault you can't draw!"

"Shut the fuck up, I drew it fast," he snapped. "Look, it doesn't matter. Each line symbolizes all the ways the aspects interact with each other. Which ones are opposed, which ones cooperate, and which ones ignore each other completely, which is slightly different from not having a line at all."

"I don't see fire," said Jade. "There's only twelve Aspects?" She raised her eyebrow.

"Fuck. Nobody cares about fire okay! I mean, technically there's 108 Aspects and that's a number of major cosmic significance across all possible realities in existence, but only twelve Aspects actually matter in the grand scheme of things. They're the primary forces binding the universe in place, turning the wheels of the mechanism of existence. Everything is made out of these twelve. You can't make things out of fire. Fire only does one thing, burn." Jade nodded as if she understood. Sollux knew he had only confused her further and damned himself for a terrible teacher.

"But what about Breath?" she asked. "Isn't it just air? I mean we need it to live but other things don't need it to exist. And rocks and stuff aren't alive, are they?"

"That's a good question," said Sollux. "They all have non-indicative names, because otherwise each one would just be a long list and it would be confusing as hell because so much stuff overlaps. Breath is air, but not just air. It's the act of breathing, life-giving motion. Life is simply the state of being alive, but Breath is the part of a thing that experiences it. Life is probably the vaguest and most nebulous aspect, so it's good that neither of us has it." Sollux scuffed out the illustration with his foot. "It doesn't matter though. This is all mage stuff. I showed your brother a little bit and it helped him for sure, but he's not like me, and you're way different than either of us. You're a witch."

Jade nodded, hand on her chin. "I was beginning to suspect."

"That's what witches do, they suspect. They have power without understanding. Your brother had inherent understanding. Me, I had to work my ass off to get where I am, but now I'm stronger than either of you." Jade giggled. Damn, he'd been trying to piss her off. "No," he snapped, "you're supposed to feel angry. Mages know. Witches feel."

"How—?"

"What the fuck did I just say?" he snapped, eyes beginning to flash alternating colors.

Jade stood up and stamped her foot. "It's not my fault you're such a shitty teacher!"

"Not my fault you're such a shitty witch!" Sollux countered, beginning to crackle.

"Fuck off! I'll go save the kingdom myself!" Jade was starting to crackle as well, but gold and green rather than red and blue. A stray bolt struck the ground and set off another green flame. The walls and floor of the room seemed to be moving, distorting. Sollux grinned. This would be fun.

* * *

"Who the fuck are these people?" John muttered under a friendly smile. WV chittered nervously next to him, head twitching left and right in a panic. The small back room of their shared home was now stuffed with fifteen or so people in addition to John, the Carapacian, and Tavros.

The troll, looking a bit browner than was the usual, muttered. "Other people, with our, uh, affinity. They would also um, like to learn."

"I figured," John said, still smiling, examining the eager face of a young muskox-horned troll, floating on inch off the ground. A human girl in the back saw him looking in her direction and began juggling marbles with her Breath. "Why did you _invite_ them is the question?"

"I want to blow things down with my mind," said a lanky, blank-eyed boy near the back.

"I want to kill Dersites," said a pretty yellowblood with a broken horn and a twitchy eye, "like the man who killed the Regent!"

"We're patriots," said the muskox-horns, firing off a stiff salute.

"Glub," explained a burly Salamander in black robes.

"Wait," said John, "what was that last one?"

"Glub?" the Salamander raised its staff.

"No," he snapped, "the one before!"

"At your service, Majesty!" the troll said.

"Sweet Merciful Sufferer you told these people I'm the Heir!?" John shouted at Tavros, poking him in the chest with the sharp end of his pipe, drawing a pinprick of chocolaty blood.

"No!" Tavros shouted, just as the other troll said "yes Majesty!"

"I didn't know!" said the girl with the marbles.

"Fuckin' killer," said the blank-eyed boy.

The Salamander popped a spit-bubble.

The yellowblood let out a happy giggle that became a cruel snort. "Next he'll tell us he's the one who killed the regent!" She grinned, lolling her head. "…did you?"

WV nodded vigorously. John slapped his forehead, forgetting that he was still holding the pipe and giving himself a vicious smack with the knob of his improvised weapon. "Okay fine! I'm the prince! I killed the Regent! Are you happy now?"

"No," said the marble girl cheerfully.

"Not until we've reclaimed our city and seen you safely restored to the throne," said muskox-horns, just as the yellowblood said "fuck that, I just wanna have your wigglers!"

"Don't you want to be king, sire?" asked the overly patriotic troll, sounding dubious for the first time since he'd spoken. "Don't you want to restore Prospit?"

John opened his mouth to speak and hesitated. He sat down and thought for a while, ignoring the confused stares of the gathered Breath enabled.

Finally, John spoke. "No," he said. "I don't want to be king of Prospit if it's the same Prospit that it was before. We're not just going to take back this city, we're going to improve it."

* * *

"So let's not be one of those overly affectionate moirallegiances that are like, _hugging_ all the time and _papping_ each other in public and shit like that," said Karkat.

Vriska made a noise and stuck her tongue out. "Gross. Some people have noooooooo shame, I swear! If you start causing a scene in public I'ma just take you aside to some alley or something and pap your brains out in private."

"Hey," Karkat snapped, "what makes you think you'll be doing the papping all of the sudden? Ten minutes ago you were practically begging me to pap you. Besides, you need it more! I scream and shout and stuff to get my aggression out, you do it because you're a mentally damaged sociopath."

Vriska tossed her hair into his face. "Please Karkat, you are _no_ emotional rock. Besides, what _century_ are we even living in? Who says that just one partner has to pap and one has to be papped? Times are changing. Carapacians can own land, and two humans of the same gender can get married. We can pap each other if the situation requires!"

Karkat's eyelid twitched. "Like…simultaneously?"

Vriska paled. "Do you…want to try?"

With an awkward half-smile, Karkat said, "okay?" and raised his hand to her face. Trembling slightly, she did likewise.

Then she stopped. "By the Sufferer, aren't you gonna shoosh me first? Be a gentleman!" Karkat blushed and muttered an apology, then began to hum the soothing noise. Eventually, the two made simultaneous contact. It was awesome.

* * *

The pair trekked down the broken tunnel, taking care to make as little noise as possible. The giddiness of a new moirallegience and simulface-pap passes quickly when deep inside a nest of horrors beneath the crumbling corpse of a city. They did not encounter angels again for quite a while, thought once a bright white light filled a side corridor and the pair had to hide among the jagged rocks again. Karkat cut his palm open and swore. Vriska bit down on her upper lip, breathing hard. Her cap started sparking again.

Karkat could hear singing in his head and tried not to think about anything too loudly. The voice in his head was somehow deep and bestial. He retreated deeper into the rocks, and placed a comforting hand on Vriska's cheek. She leaned into it unconsciously as they watched the creature emerge.

This angel was once again different, and Karkat surmised that it must be a more mature version of the ones he'd fought at the beach. In addition to being easily two stories long, it had a long, animalistic head with a frill spikes across the back of it, a bit like a dragon, though like all the other angels they'd met its exact features were indeterminate. It _did_ seem to have a mouth, with a long blue tongue inside. The wormy tail had thickened into a muscular limb like a crocodile's, that dragged behind it for balance, and it had developed crude two-clawed legs to pull itself through the tunnels. It extended itself as it entered their tunnel, and had to stoop for the comparatively low ceiling. Its wings were not only much larger than its younger kinsmen, but there were six of them, which it used to cover its middle area almost like clothing. For some reason, Karkat felt that he would be much happier if he never had to see what was underneath. Sure, it might just have been to protect its body, but angels didn't follow real biological rules. They were just angry minds with no real substance to them. A protective covering for a real animal, he was certain, was just a sheath for something horrible.

The angel stomped its way in the direction the trolls had come from and paid them no mind. After ten minutes, its light had completely disappeared and their eyes had readjusted to the darkness. Vriska gave Karkat a very quick hug and ran out into the tunnel.

* * *

The tunnel did not change, but it seemed to grow larger. The ragged ridges of broken stone seemed to grow taller, and sharper, like shark teeth. Eventually, it got light enough to see without the glow of Karkat's weapon. The light was coming from the very end of the tunnel—who knew how far off—and it was the harsh pearlescent glow of the angels. Vriska called a halt and looked at the map. "We're going the right way," she said.

Karkat nodded. "Is that the Grotto of Despair or whatever?"

Vriska shook her head. "There's a big central hub just before it," she said. "That's what's at the end of the tunnel."

"And it's probably full of angels," Karkat finished.

Vriska rolled her shoulders and popped her neck. "Fuck'em. Let's go."

The central hub was, in fact, a hub. Like a the spokes of a huge wheel, a dozen tunnels led off in all directions. The high vaulted ceiling was shrouded in darkness, despite the blinding light of the sleeping angels.

They lay all around, and though the combined total of their glowing not-flesh erased all shadows in the vicinity, their milky pearl light seemed dimmed in comparison to other angels they'd seen, and their skin greyer. The thoughts and images here were less coherent, muttered whispers in their mental language, strange scenes with no easily defined shapes or events. Is this what all dreams looked like to outsiders, the trolls wondered, or were the dreams of angels just that alien to mortal minds? Probably, Karkat thought, it was both.

Vriska's hat glowed like a halo as it repelled their mental advances, and she was skittish and angry. Karkat put his hand on her shoulder and led her around, taking a long meandering path that kept them far from any angels, or as far as they could get. All the same, she had her knife in hand, and he had his sickle, burning like a torch.

The lack of shadows was odd. It did things to their perception of distance, and dimension. A standard hatchling seemed as big as a mountain and impossibly far, until his perception righted itself and it turned out to have simply been very, very close. "What are you doing!" Vriska hissed under her breath.

"You didn't see it either!" Karkat snapped back. Karkat found himself growing dizzy. His horn started aching again, and it became more difficult to walk. Vriska, with her vision eightfold, did not seem to be having the same problem, at least not to the same extent. He wished his mutant blood had given him more of an advantage, like heat-vision or retractable claws, instead of just resistance to angel telepathy. Of course, if had been a _useful _trait, they wouldn't have tried to stamp out the bloodline—

He thought that his perspective was screwed up again, but now it seemed that he was right. There was, in fact, a monstrously huge angel right in the center of the room, and it was terrible to behold. Its upper body resembled a man's, but its hands had entirely too many fingers. Its head was elongated and sharp, and seemed to have far more features than a standard angel's. Karkat could make out eyelids, ear-pads like on a bird, nostrils, and a slit along the length of its snout. Or was it a beak? Its skin was mottled all over with growths and patterns that could have been veins on a natural creature, but they were far too thick and numerous, and seemed to have extended past its body. All around the monster in a perfect circle, the veiny tendrils had spread and…_taken root_. Karkat wondered where its veins were—

There was a hideous tearing sound, and something rose up from the living mountain. A huge thick tentacle—no, a neck. The tendrils, roots, veins, what have you, were hanging limp from the appendage and leaking phosphorescent white blood, huge droplets that splashed to the floor with the sound of a rainstorm. Vriska shied back, feeling stupid as she did so; there was no way they were close enough for it to touch. There was another head on the thing where its legs would be if it were human. Another tearing sound, and a second head followed. They were almost snakelike, but with crocodilian mouths and a mane of long, sharp quills, fading to impossibly thin points, so thin not even Vriska could see where they ended. She wondered what they could cut, and why anyone would need to cut it. Then one of the heads opened its eyes.

The trolls thought they had known the meaning of light. They had been wrong. The searing silvery-gold radiance emanating from the beast's eyes was bright enough to scald their skin and left them dazzled. Vriska immediately pulled down her hood over her eyes, and then tore off a strip of fabric from her shirt and tied it around her head. Even with her eyes closed, even with all of that, she could still see the burning light. But at least she wouldn't go blind.

Karkat was reeling on the floor, trying not to scream. Vriska wondered if it would really hurt them all that much at this point. She lifted him up to her shoulders and started running.

Sporadically she used her vision eight-fold to see where she was going. She caught flashes of movement. The angels were waking up. Their thoughts, though still muffled by the tinfoil, were clearer, stronger. And they didn't give a shit about her. The angels were crawling, slithering, flying over to their king—what else could the monster be?—and paid the interlopers no mind. The angels were making noise now, not only mental but physical, a strange rhythmic bussing that made her hair stand on end. Their thoughts filled the air, singular and persistent like a crowd of people singing the same song. It was about submission and love, and some other completely alien concept that made Vriska dizzy trying to understand. The ugly tearing sound the king of angels made as it roused itself continued in the background. Vriska was suddenly taken by the urge to turn and look. She knew that if she did, she would go blind in her beautiful, miraculous left eye, and the thought made her panic. Judging by the throbbing pain in it, she could tell it was already damaged, probably irreparably, but, if she could just crane her neck….

"HOLY SHIT!" shouted Karkat. Somehow that strengthened Vriska's resolve. She would not gawk like a tourist like her Moirail was doing right now. Of course, she spent the rest of her days wondering. Karkat refused to ever speak of what he saw.

By some miracle she managed to be heading in the right direction. Up ahead was the only splotch of darkness in the room, a shadowy blob, from which was coming the scent of salt. It was a hole in the stones and bricks that seemed to have fallen open naturally over time. As she approached, she noticed that the stones were covered in mold and lichen, and had started forming stalactites. It looked like a black mouth.

There were no more angels in the immediate vicinity; they'd avoided being so near to saltwater. However, enough of them were awake that she could feel their presence in her head as if she were completely unprotected. Only the scalding heat on Vriska's scalp, burning worse than the angel king's gaze, was a sign of the tinfoil hat's continued existence. The fact that she could still think clearly was a likely only because the angels were so distracted with their profane adorations.

And there was a sound like being inside a thunder cloud as every angel great and small spread its wings and took to the air simultaneously. Vriska's eardrums burst and she might have screamed. She could definitely feel Karkat screaming, but there wasn't any sound anymore, other than a high pitched wine. She jumped the last few feet and hit the water hard. Its coldness was both excruciatingly painful and euphorically soothing on her burnt skin.

She immediately tore off her hood and blindfold; the water was very clear, and the light from the chamber above filtered down to a comforting blue, as long as she didn't look up. The little tinfoil hat finally lost structural integrity and dissolved, the charred flakes of metal floating off in random directions, along with a distressingly large amount of her hair.

Karkat caught her eye, finally able to move under his own power. He looked awful, skin cracked and blistered and mottled with his ugly red blood that still sent black urges through her brain. He pointed emphatically off to the side with a newly mottled hand, and Vriska saw that this cave was in fact a tunnel. They swam.

* * *

Author's Note: IT'S BEEN SO LONG. I missed this fic so much :')

Okay guys, I often ask for reader participation in my other fics and for the first and only time ever, I will do so in this one. You can name any of the OCs in John's gathering, just specify which one. There are also about ten other people that did not speak or were not mentioned, so you can submit a Breath Aspected OC for inclusion. You have until the next chapter goes up, which may be any time at all.

Karkat and Vriska's exchange at the beginning of their section: my proudest moment.

Sollux's section; the opening bit was a rewrite of the introduction of a certain character in the silent film _Metropolis_, which was an inspiration for this fic. Particularly, it gave me the idea for how to write Prospit, as an impossibly huge city with a mysterious past and very deep, dark secrets. Here's a little hint for something in THIS story: there was an identical white house in Derse. Can you believe that I intended for the whole city of Wrath arc to be done in one chapter? I think I mentioned it before but damn I was dumb.

Other notes: this story was intended to be finished the week of May 14th, which was also the week I started it. I was young and foolish.


	9. Inheritance

Vriska did not recall reaching the end of the tunnel, but she must have, because she was dry and breathing. Her head hurt like a bastard and she could hardly move, and it felt like someone had replaced her skin with a bag of nettles, but she was no longer swimming, and best of all no longer surrounded by angels. Or so she hoped. Her eyes, see, were closed.

Feeling like someone had sealed them shut with roofing nails, she forced open her eyelids. There was a nasty afterimage in her left eye that almost looked like a thumbprint and she had the sinking feeling would never go away. It seemed her vision eightfold had been reduced to something like four or five; she was unsure as none of the pupils seemed to have been blinded, merely damaged. Vriska sat up and looked around. She was in a well-lit, dome shaped cavern (though she couldn't find a light-source) lined with pinkish mother-of-pearl and coral. In the center was a beautiful, crystalline-blue pool, perfectly round, lined with a soft, sandy beach. She could barely see to the other end, and was unable to tell if it was because of the distance or her eyes. Where the hell was that Moirail of hers?

* * *

Karkat had never felt healthier in his life. His horn had been healed miraculously, and the wounds and burns all over his skin had been replaced with clean, even grey skin as soft as a human baby's. He was on his knees and had been unable to move for the past few hours; the water lapped against his thighs. He was rooted to the spot because something was calling to him, asking things of him that he didn't want to give. The sickle was stuck in the sand next to him, its burning words obscured by the sand and the tide.

_It's me you silly boy!_ said the voice in his head. Something had attacked them as they came through the tunnel, he thought, but he couldn't remember. _I'm the prize you seek,_ it repeated. Something rose out of the water in front of him. It was too shallow and too clear for whatever it was to have been there, but emerge it did. A troll girl, a sea-dweller. She was very pretty, he thought, looking at her cascading black hair like a living thing, and her full black lips. Something had hurt him, coming up for air. He felt a phantom pain in his abdomen. No, three of them.

She flashed him a coy smile. _Mindfang hid me here ages ago, cursed me to never be able to leave. I'm the true empress; the other one is just a pretender. You can release me,_ she said, placing a finger against her pursed lips. _All you need to do is come here!_ The girl spread her arms wide and welcoming. _Give me a kiss, and the wealth of Alternia is yours! _Karkat heard something vague and far off. He couldn't quite catch it. Slowly, painfully, his knee scraped across the sand and dragged him forward.

* * *

"KAAAAAAAARKAAAAAAAAT!" Vriska shouted right in his ear. He was just kneeling their looking hale and hearty and spazzing completely the fuck out. She grabbed his shoulder and tried to shake him, but he was as inflexible as a rock, and her limbs were weak from exhaustion. She tried to move his head but he was completely catatonic, applying enough counter-force so as to remain perfectly still.

"Snap the fuck out of it you fuckass!" She hissed, smacking him. A ruddy handprint appeared on his face, but other than that nothing happened. "Wait," she muttered, "we're together now," she thought for a moment and caressed Karkat's cheek. "Sweetheart," she said, voice saccharine-sweet. "Snap the fuck out of it you fuckass!" she hissed, smacking him again. Once again, this did nothing.

After a few minutes of trying to resuscitate her Moirail, Karkat started moving, kneeing his way deeper into the water. "No," she said, grabbing his shoulder. "Don't be stupid. You're going to drown yourself!"

Even with her lifetime of malnourishment, Vriska still had some measure of the strength bred into the highbloods. And yet, she was unable to stop Karkat or even slow him down in the slightest, and he made his slow, painful way into the water until Vriska was dragged in up to her waist, her feet digging up deep muddy furrows in the ground behind. "Stop it right now," she snapped. "Come on," she said, face softening a little. "We can pap each other simultaneously again! That was fun! I'll read one of your stupid books and pretend I liked it." Karkat continued his walk. "Karkat I will have _sex_ with you. I mean it. I will let you pail with me one time." Nothing. She tried a different tactic. "_Please_ stop," she said, patting his cheek. "Pleeeeeeeease? I really mean it, I can't—urgh!" she bit back an ugly retort and proceeded to shoosh and pap Karkat with desperation. "I can't do this without you," she muttered.

Karkat did not slow or stop. That motherfucker. Vriska was just bearing herself to the elements for this asshole; not once but twice in a single fucking day did she have to confess about her _feelings_ for this undeserving twat-bucket and how his stupid mutant face with its complete disregard for thousands of years of breeding, just serendipitously coming out all new and heinous and making the black and white fluids inside her vacillate like craaaaaaaazy to the point she thought she'd have a fucking attack of some kind if he didn't touch her face _right now_ and she was burning blue just thinking about this stupidity and _he had the fucking gall_ to sit there and continue being high or catatonic or hallucinating or whatever bullshit excuse he had. Well Vriska wasn't having it!

She put her hands to her forehead because it helped her concentrate. Maybe she'd used up the last bit of her strength killing that angel, but she didn't think so. She knew herself well enough to know that she might be holding out on herself. She was a tricky bitch. Vriska thought at Karkat so hard that the blood pressure in her head was like having it trapped in a vice. There was a…blooming sensation in the back of her head, a big tropical flower opening up at once, and a trickle of blue dribbled down her nose—

And she was in. Her voice echoed in his head; _cut that shit out right now you pitiful fuuuuuuuu—_

And then she saw, through his eyes, what he'd been seeing this whole time. It was a beautiful young sea-dweller, beckoning Karkat towards his doom. _Help me_, he thought.

_Fuck yeah I will,_ said Vriska, drawing her knife. "Hey sea-bitch," she said out loud, glaring at her through Karkat's eyes, "this fucker belongs to me and to Princess Jade Crocker, but most importantly to _me_. You can't get any!"

It was at this exact moment that Vriska realized what her main problem was as a person. She'd always been very intelligent, but not particularly clever, so for this she can be forgiven. She also possessed a hearty mixture of obscene pride and deep anger that made her do stupidly idiotic things such as challenging a sea-dweller, and an apparently magical one at that, while standing hip-deep in salt-water.

Her opponent surged through the water like a dolphin, splitting it with a trail of crystal-white foam, grinning like a shark, golden trident raised high in the air. Vriska was fast and took a swing at her, feeling the slightest impact in her chest as she did so; the sea-dweller's trident must have just missed her. Vriska's knife tore an ugly wound in the girl's face with the notch on the dull side, meant for chopping through ropes. She grinned in victory for a second as the sea-dweller howled, spraying pink blood into the cobalt-blue water.

Then Vriska finally felt the awful, throbbing pain of the three spearheads lodged in her chest, the ugly sting as the salt water lapped against the wound, the tweaking sensation as the weight of the weapon pulled it down. She could feel the damn thing against her bones, and the blue in the water was coming from her, but there was so much of it that she didn't believe that _all_ of it could have, not in so little time, it didn't make sense; she must have been bleeding for days—

The trident twisted in the sea-dweller's hand and Vriska experienced temporary oblivion as she was raised up into the air, brought back to cold, sobering, painful reality as she was submerged in the water completely.

Vriska's damaged eyes could barely make out anything in the increasingly dark water as she was pushed, down, down, _doooooooown_, past a gaping black void that must have been where she and Karkat had come from, past walls decorated with pearl strings and glittering jewels and platinum enough to buy Prospit and Derse and half the Empire into the bargain. Deeper down, and deeper still, and all she could see was the sea-dweller's angry face and the sadistic joy of the kill in her pretty, predatory smile, and the mingling of their blood. What the hell was a princess doing here? Her hair was writing and swirling like a living thing, and behind her…what was that? Silver gossamer fins and…a tail? Vriska realized she was dying.

They hit bottom and the trip must have been shorter than she'd thought because the blow was still somehow strong enough to knock the breath out of her in a big bubble tinted with her blood. It popped just above her, releasing a cascade of sparks that she realized was the result of her vision finally giving out, her body shutting down all inessential functions first. The pain was gone, but sensation was still there. She felt wood, old and rotted, underneath one hand, and then the pull and tug and push as the sea-bitch pinned her to the ground with her trident, as if Vriska was going anywhere. She felt the wake of the sea-dweller leaving. It felt smug. Vriska couldn't feel her limbs anymore. Her blood-pusher was still pumping away dutifully, expelling her blood and replacing it with salt-water. There were still sparks dancing in her eyes. Vriska realized she was sad, and might even have been crying. Pain had stopped being a thing _aaaaaaaages_ ago, pay attention; she was sad because now Karkat would fail, her poor stupid Moirail. His girl would go off and marry some Dersite ass-hat, and John…that didn't bear thinking about.

The sparks were winking, dwindling away to nothing. Seven. Six. Five. She had a funny thought. Four. Three. Two. "Will the last one out please turn off the lights?" One. Nothing.

* * *

The stars are always out, even during the daytime.

This thing wasn't a star, but maybe a representation of their light? It had a sister, and _that_ was a star. She was brilliant and hot and ever-present, giving life and guiding it towards its ultimate goal.

The light of the other stars, the ones that can't be seen in the day time, takes billions of years to reach this planet. If they want to do anything here, they need to plan it out eons ahead of time. It doesn't pay to be clever. Cleverness is far too in the moment. It takes knowledge, and the ability to use it.

The light of seven perfect stars, sisters of equal size, shape, color, and distance from each other linked in an eternal dance, first reached it exactly one thousand years ago. The planet was round, or so the light noted. What the locals called the end of the world was a piece of the void, the outer ring that its kind was not permitted to see; something to do with ancient contracts and the rules of some game. It was none of the light's concern.

What was its concern was a young troll standing on the beach looking up, eyes full of wonder. She was small, but they always start out small. Her blood was blue and she wore a fine dress but the light neither knew nor cared. Whatever she'd been didn't matter anymore. What mattered was what she would become, with the light's guidance. The seven perfect sisters twinkled in her left eye, a perfect match for the constellation. The light filled her head with dreams of wealth and prestige, and a kind of immortality. Any dumb blue-blooded girl can be a Marquis, the light told her. She was to be a pirate. The greatest and most terrible pirate there ever was or would ever be.

* * *

A woman grown, still young at three hundred years, the girl had become as beautiful and deadly as the ocean. She'd sailed to the very heart of the Empire and ripped it out. The Empress was dead and all the little princesses would fight each other for the throne. Her blue lips pulled back in a sneer that spoke of equal parts pleasure and cruelty. Not all of them. She looked down at the sparkling pink eyes of the wiggler in her hands. She'd need something to guard her treasures.

The tiny princess, Feferi, grew up loving her strange and wonderful lusus, the dread pirate Mindfang. Even when she took her to the witch-doctor, the madman with the aspirations of being Grand Highblood someday, whatever that meant, she still had full faith in her mother and smiled joyfully as he took her away into his colorful tent. Even when his ritual replaced her blood with salt-water and made her beautiful legs into some hideous lumpy tail and her smooth skin into pink scales, she still loved her mother. When she was shut up in the grotto with the wealth of nations and told to guard it until her return, however, she knew that her entire life and been a lie. Not even a good lie. Feferi had been entirely too trusting. She vowed she would put the trident through Mindfang's heart if she ever saw her again.

Her last sight of the sky had been of seven perfect stars. She hated them. They reminded her of her mother's eyes. Just like those little blue rocks in that one wooden chest. Her mother had loved _them_ most of all. Feferi wasn't sure why; she'd learned plenty about precious stones in her time with Mindfang and they were simple blue fluorite, hardly worth anything. When she was very young, she'd thought they were magic. But what they _were_ was precious to her mother, and so she hated them. She hid the box at the very bottom of the grotto, and in time, her hatred consumed her mind. Feferi could no longer remember where she'd put what and why, only that she was to keep people away from it and that she hated her mother.

The light found a little piece of Mindfang floating around in the world again, very recently in fact. Two of them, about to hatch from the same egg. They would be damn near identical. One would be given to the church, as was the custom with twins, and the other would be given to a lusus. That wouldn't do.

The light went into each of them and they burst out of their egg, crying and biting and gnashing their teeth, but it gave the larger part of itself to the one that would be given to a lusus, and made her so difficult and angry and violent that none of them would want her, not even that monstrous spider that would likely have just had her as a snack. That was hyperbole. The light knew what lay down that path, and the world didn't need another Mindfang. It needed a Vriska Serket. Not immediately, but soon, at least in star-time.

Soon. _Now_.

* * *

Vriska grabbed the box. Of course it was a box; she'd put it there. At least, she'd had others put it there. It all amounted to the same thing, or so she thought, before giving it a good, hard shake. She couldn't hear the dice rattling inside, but she felt it. Of course they were dice. What else would they be?

Power and strength surged into Vriska and she felt herself become _more_ somehow. Her wounded body re-knit itself, not merely mending her but improving. Vriska's vision became clearer and brighter until the platinum on the walls gleamed like fire. Her mind expanded and she smirked at her younger self and the pride in her little sting. She could sense all around her at once now. Her clothes had changed too. They resembled that outfit she'd bought at the market, black leather with blue piping and spider-web patterns, but this outfit seemed so much more practical, like armor. It was much more conservative for that matter; she blushed remembering that Karkat had said she looked like a hooker. That had _hurt_, dammit.

Speaking of, he was up above there, a little ball of anger, fear, and frustration. Of course Feferi was with him (how did she know that name? It had all been so clear a moment ago while she was dying, but now that she was better it was all fading away as quickly as sand from a broken hourglass), a cluster of pain and insanity. Vriska felt bad for what she'd done to her—no, not she herself, Mindfang. Her ancestor, apparently. It felt odd, knowing she had one.

Vriska shook the box again. There was no need to actually see the dice, and in fact not seeing them bettered her chances of getting a favorable role; it seemed that observing things changed their outcomes. Interesting. Vriska rocketed upwards through the water as if she'd been shot from a cannon. The water around her foamed up into a silver-white cone of bubbles as she accelerated, upwards and upwards, getting faster and faster. Feferi looked down at her, and her mouth opened in horror. Vriska realized she must look exactly like Mindfang now. She drew her knife—but it wasn't a knife anymore, it was a huge cutlass, glowing blue, with a wicked notch near the end like a fishing hook. Well, only one thing to do with fishing hooks.

As she burst out of the water, Vriska took a backhanded swing at Feferi with the sword; the hook caught her right in the jaw and dragged her out into the air. With a hard swing, Vriska threw her out onto land, splattering a trail of pink across the sand. She grinned evilly. It was good to be the strong one for once—

She fell back down into the water. Well, that charge had to run out sometime, she supposed. Vriska paddled towards the sand, pushing Karkat's prone form out of the way. Her new muscles were accustomed to swimming, or built for it, or something.

Feferi was squirming on the ground, flopping like a fish, screaming wretchedly into her shirt front, trying to stanch the blood-flow. She really wasn't a troll anymore, Vriska saw. She had a tail where her legs ought to have been, and dark pink scales in places, and thin, gossamer fins, not at _all_ like other sea-dwellers she'd seen. Vriska stomped out onto the lad, water sluicing off her in seconds, tinted with pink and blue. Her gloves and boots were bright red, she noted absently, like fresh human blood. She held up her sword; it seemed to hum in the air like a tuning fork. The sound changed slightly as she steadied her arm for the kill, almost as if it was telling her how best to strike. Arm out, elbow bent, wrist loose. Feferi squirmed away. She really was terrified.

Hook her around the neck and _pull_, the sword seemed to sing. Splatter her all around this chamber and then go home towards eternal happiness. Sailing. Plunder. Vriska had plans. The sack of Prospit and Derse first, then the Empire and finally the Beforan republic. With the wealth of nations she would launch an expedition to distant Eire, and then who knew? But she didn't want power and she didn't care about money. If she'd cared about money, would she have sunk everything here in some dank pit guarded by monsters? And any idiot with a knife had power; she could pluck the stars from the sky with the kind of power she had. All she needed was the dice and this sword, and most of all, _infamy_. It was stronger than wine, than even sopor, and sweeter than candy. It was what she lived for, what she'd been _hatched_ for, to become a story to tell children and wigglers, and remind them that there were real monsters in this life, real, unapologetic evil, because if there weren't monsters, what would you measure heroes against? Why else would she have burned a hundred ships, plundered the world's greatest super-power, hidden her treasure in a nest of horrors and used a proud Alternian princess as a _watchdog_? Vriska caught Feferi around the neck, just like the sword told her. The worthless thing had betrayed her—

_No she hadn't!_ Vriska snapped. She wasn't thinking these thoughts. _Mindfang_ was. The sword hummed to itself amusedly. Vriska had a direct link to her ancestor, her hero—

And she was a heinous bitch. _We can't all live up other people's expectations_, the sword seemed to say. _Now let's finish her off and take our dice_.

"I'm sorry," Feferi muttered, speech garbled and thick. "Please leave me alone."

_The wretch tried to kill me. Us. She failed at her duty._

_ No she didn't, she did exactly what you told her to do; you're insaaaaaaaane._

_ You're weak._

_ Piss off. _Vriska stabbed the sword into the sand. _I'm not done with you,_ Vriska added warningly. _The world only needs one manipulative cobalt-blood._ She knelt and laid a hand on Feferi's shoulder. The girl tensed. "I'm not going to hurt you," Vriska reassured with an eye-roll. "Anymore, that is." She drifted away from herself, sensing. There was the black ball of hatred and sadism radiating from her sword, and some reflection of its madness trapped in the poor, mutilated princess. Her shoulder was so _cold_. "What did she do to you?" Vriska wondered. Feferi whimpered. "Wow, you are fuuuuuuuucked up," she snapped. "Hold still."

She shook her box again. Feferi spasmed and fell instantly asleep. Her kin started peeling off in ugly grey-white flakes and Vriska was afraid that she'd done the wrong thing and killed her. Mindfang snickered in her…mind.

"Fuck off," she snapped out loud, glaring at the sword imbedded in the sand. "And go to so much hell you quivering asshat. You're not even a person anymore, you're a bunch of genetic memories reawakened by a handful of magic dice and nobody even cares what you think!" She threw a handful of sand at the gleaming blade. It flashed indignantly

_Stupid child,_ said Mindfang, gleefully, _Here you are arguing with yourself while your Moirail is drowning. _Shit. Vriska spied him floating facedown over the darkest part of the water, where it suddenly plunged down hundreds of feet into the depths, and where the rest of the treasure horde awaited. Vriska ran out into the water, churning up sand into the already sullied pool, and took care to stop at the edge of the shallows; she didn't want to waste time swimming back up from the depths. Vriska reached out, stretching towards Karkat and grabbed a cold, stiff finger. Shiiiiiiiit. Vriska pulled him over to her and dragged him back to land as quickly as she could. Feferi looked like a gigantic wad of burned paper now, but Vriska couldn't afford to care.

Karkat was cold, and he wasn't breathing. Vriska laid down a hefty hammerblow to his chest. Mindfang taunted her. _He's dead you kno_—

Vriska reached out with her mind into that yawning black void and commanded Mindfang to shut the hell up forever. It felt like throwing a sledgehammer at a mirror and watching it explode, except that Vriska was the hammer, and the person throwing the hammer, and the mirror too, even though the mirror was someone else, and the yawning blackness was gone. The cavern seemed brighter. Vriska felt ill. For some reason, this victory was hollow, as if it had only been allowed to exist to please her. Karkat was still and cold. She punched him again, near to tears. A fountain of dirty water burst out of his mouth and Vriska smiled. He lay still.

She hugged him to her chest and cried for the second time today. _No_, she thought. She reached into Karkat's head, her mind like a vicious claw, grabbing and squeezing. _Live_. There was still a little spark of something deep in his brain, she saw. She stoked it, commanding, bullying, pleading, and it grew. She commanded Karkat's heart to beat, his lungs to breath, his brain to work. She didn't know anything about anatomy and she'd never even imagined having powers this strong before; she was just fucking about with his nervous system and hoping it would work. Karkat coughed.

* * *

"Okay, first of all," said John, "everyone tell me your names."

The patriotic troll stepped forward and gave a crisp salute. "Domenn Patria, at your service, majesty."

"What's your rank?" John asked, raising an eyebrow. "I'd thought you were in the military."

The troll began to sweat. "Well. Not as _such_, sire…"

"He just likes books on military history," said the yellowblood, shoving her way past with a deranged smile. "He's never even held a sword!" whispering, she added, "Domenn's a farmer! He grows citrons by the south gate!" She then curtsied, as if just remembering that she was addressing royalty, and did it poorly at that. "I'm Alppis Corhai, and I'll be your fuuuuuuuuuuuuture briiiiiiiiiiiide."

"Um," said John, taking a step back, "We'll talk about that later."

"Yessir," she said with an exaggerated wink.

In short order he had memorized the names of all fifteen, and had them all knighted, tapping them on the shoulders with his cane, including WV and Tavros. "You're also my pageboy, Tavros," John added as Tavros rose from his knees. "You go into a room just before I do and tell people that I'm coming and list off all my titles and possessions. It's very important."

"That just sounds egotistical and mean," mumbled Tavros.

"Egotistical and mean _sire_," John warned. Turning back to the crowd, John gave a dramatic wave of his pipe. "Now everyone! Let's all do the windy thing!"

* * *

It soon became apparent that the windy thing should not be done indoors. It was decided that all future training would be done at Domenn's farm outside the city gates, away from not only the prying eyes of Dersite sympathizers, but also out where there was more space and fewer fragile things to destroy while trying to keep a feather up in the air.

It was a big house, though the troll was embarrassed by what he perceived to be its humbleness. Sure, thought John as he admired the place, it couldn't compete with the palace, but this had been built by mortal hands, not whatever cosmic masons had built the city. This 'modest' home was exquisite by those standards. It was a broad, three-storeyed house built of clay and wooden beams. The beams were of good, pale yellow hardwood that they harvested from the western forests that contrasted surprisingly with the honey-colored walls. Hadn't Rose called Prospit a study in yellow? The inside was elegant, decorated with brass and copper, yellow wood furniture, and with splashes of color in the form of fine carpets from the Empire, dyed, John feared, with troll blood. It really did make wonderful colors, but he needed to come down on it as _soon_ as he became king. All the same, they were works of beauty.

Domenn Patria also had an armory. "In the event that I ever had to retake the city, sire," he explained. "Fortunately circumstances have proven me to be quite sane."

The weapons and armor were older but well maintained, surplus from the knights that had been sold off at auction. Gold plating gleamed on every shelf of the man's basement. There was a fine war-hammer almost like the one John's father had used. But he liked his pipe now.

"It's just enough for us," said Tavros, comparing a jousting lance with a heavy bladed spear, "but what about everyone else? We can't take over a city with just seventeen guys, no matter how, uh, _Breathy_ they are."

"We'll do something about that," agreed John. "And we'll have to distinguish ourselves. There are a lot of Knights in Derse's pocket still wearing the gold. We'll have to stand out."

"Royal blue," Alppis insisted. "It's your personal color, and the color of the Breath." She reached into her bag and produced a surprising amount of the fabric while shouting "ta-daaaaaaaaaaa!" and counting off to twelve with her foot. John grimaced. How many trolls had died for this?

"I make it myself," she said proudly.

"Holy shit," said John, stepping back and sticking out his pipe. Tavros took up a defensive position. The entire room became tense.

"I grow indigo at my place at the desert's edge," she said. "I mix my dyes with the dust to make it ssssssssssssparkle!" She added excitedly, eyes dilating with emotion. John started breathing again.

* * *

There was a surprising resource in the Sage. No one knew the Salamander's actual name, as he could apparently only speak in his native tongue. However, he proved himself to be enormously skilled with the Breath. John wondered why he'd shown up the first day at all, then remembered that Patria had only come out of a sense of patriotism, and not exactly for tutoring. Perhaps this fellow was the same. They were practicing out in the orchard; it was closed off by a wall of clay and river-stones. The citrons Domenn grew were of the Witch's Hand variety and had a very strong but pleasant scent, though John thought they looked more like golden-green horrorterrors. The Witch had always been one of his favorites of the Four, she seemed so gentle and kind, and he wondered why people would name these ugly things after her; it was almost an insult. But maybe there was something to be said about it, symbolically speaking. He was just no good at finding symbols and turned his head back to the Sage's demonstration.

"Glub," said the Sage, and a bubble of gleaming blue spittle drifted from his mouth towards a nearby tree. It exploded against the bark, igniting the entire tree with a bright blue gas-flame, intensifying the smell of citrus a hundred-fold as the lumpy, hand-shaped fruits shriveled and burned, fingers curling into angry black fists. Shit, thought John, as Domenn and his lusus, some kind of six-legged amphibian with a leaf-shaped tail, tried desperately to put it out. Breath of fire. A _very_ advanced skill. John could barely light a candle even now. It was a thing of mages, and John simply didn't have the right mindset for it, but the Sage could do almost anything with Breath regardless of the exact discipline.

With his help, John was able to get his loyal knights as Breath capable as he himself had been before his ascension. Now, all they needed was a plan.

"The Harmattan is coming!" announced Fang Abata, the brown-haired girl with the marbles. At first he'd thought she simply had a big forehead, but apparently Fang had come from a far away land where the custom was for women to shave the front third or so of their heads. She had an eager smile and big grey eyes, and was essentially the opposite of Alppis in personality. "Maybe we could do something with that?" John scratched his chin. That was a distinct possibility.

"We need to get the people on our side, sire," said Domenn. "You need to show them that you are alive, and that you are their king. If you can convince them that you can win, they will fight for you."

"That's also true," said John.

"I think, um, I have an idea," said Tavros, raising his hand nervously.

"Something to add?" asked John.

"Something to, uh, do."

"So how do you get a name like Fang?" asked the dead-eyed boy. He was keeping watch. Tall and gaunt with vaguely ginger hair and deep bags under his eyes, he did not look like a particularly trustworthy young man. He'd actually been part of a gang until the general ennui of life had caught up to him and he decided to wait in his home until something interesting happened, wasting away slowly, barely eating or sleeping. Then one day he'd accidentally blown out all the windows in his house with a sneeze. He'd been vaguely interested in seeing if he could do it again, and here he was a month later.

Fang, meanwhile, was busily drilling into the wall. Alppis liked to use drills, but Fang was much more well-suited to this job. Using just the Breath and a hard stone, she could make a drill better than anything made of metal. The low hum and the flying yellow powder were distracting enough that she almost didn't hear her partner's question. "It's short for Femaang," she said brightly.

"What kind of name is that, then?" he repeated.

"What kind of name is Rick Havoc?" she replied patiently.

"A badass one," he said absently. It was mid-summer, and they were both swaddled in royal blue cloaks insulated with fur. He still felt cold. The sun was setting. Up above something big and black flew clumsily. The king's speech would begin soon. Then the storm would start up properly, and the people would come out of hiding, and he and Fang would be here to arm them with stuff right from the city's armory, just as soon as she could get that hole drilled. Rick Havoc yawned. Things might get interesting soon he figured, but no need to get excited now.

* * *

Jade was down in the catacombs with Sollux. And then she wasn't. With a single step she had crossed the distance between that place and the crown of the Witch's skull, her great pointy ears flanking her to either side. She was looking out towards the east. She could see the irrigated lands all around the city for the first time in her life, the lemon orchards and the beehives and all the lovely yellow houses, and so much fucking _green_. It was like a whole different country right at the foot of her city and she'd never seen it. Less than a day's ride was the Painted Desert, like a rainbow where the ground should be, but better, because the wind played with the fine, colored dust and made it shimmer and shift. It was an ocean of crimson, burgundy, chocolate, gold, olive, lime, jade, teal, cobalt, indigo, violet, fuchsia, burgundy, on and on, more shades than she could name, and probably many that were nameless, that only existed for the fraction of time where the wind mixed the powders just right, and then they were gone forever.

Karkat was out there, somewhere. Did he know about what had happened? How could he? And things were only getting worse by the minute. Jade had often thought of Prospit as a little island in a sea of sand, a still, quiet place, a place where nothing happened. Now there were occupations, and plagues, and a war, _soon_, she could feel it. Witches knew these sorts of things. It helped having a Doom-mage for a teacher too, though. She smiled a little and took another step.

Now she was on top of the Witch's ear, standing on the toes of her red shoes like a ballerina. It didn't really help her balance at all, because the tip of the ear was as fine as a blade; she was suspending herself with her magic, willing herself not to fall. She couldn't even normally stand on her toes; she did not have the grace for dancing. Jade shaded her eyes; the sun was setting behind her, but the desert was so bright that it took effort to see. She thought she could spy the troll hatchery, that lonely little outpost with those strange, beautiful women who brought the babies to the city, sorry, _wigglers_. Troll speech always brought a laugh out of her. Behind it, she knew, was a brave little stream that made its way all the way out to the ocean. That's where he'd gone, she thought, feeling a pang. To go and collect some treasure. Had she really made that decree? She felt stupid for having done so, knowing what she did now. She wished Karkat was back. She'd marry him in a heartbeat now, treasure or not, status or not. She wondered though, if she really loved him, or if she was just lonely. God, here she was being all emotional, going from happy to sad and back, round and round and round. By the Sufferer, weren't witches supposed to be cold and stoic? She set her jaw and steeled herself.

Fuck. Karkat was travelling with that girl John had liked, wasn't he? The thought of John brought a tear to her eye, but her chest burned with anger too. She wanted to hurt the people that had hurt her family. She growled in frustration, reaching for a strand of hair to play with, but it was still too short. She'd gone her whole life, or so it seemed, without cutting it and now this stupid messy bob made her feel like a boy. That was quite enough thinking, she thought. Witches don't think, they _feel_. And for now, she felt like doing something witchy. How about flying?

She kicked off and briefly her red-shoed feet instinctually scrambled for purchase on nothing. She let out a yelp as she plummeted back to the Witch's head, and then stopped, feeling a tingling all through her body. She smirked. Hell yes. With a loud bang, she was propelling herself forward, into the sunset. She whooped with joy. "Hell fucking yes!" And then a sound filled her with equal parts dread and joy. A loud voice called out, filling the air, literally filling it, she could almost see the vibrations flowing up into the air from lower down, from every point in the city. "Attention everyone," it said. "This is your king."

* * *

Lohac had never been breached before. The lake of fire was an impenetrable barrier. Men in armor could barely even stand being near it. What's more, it was constantly in motion, so there was no fixed point of entry to attack. The day-hand (the city was a clock that measured days, months and years, of course) had twelve docking points at small villages all around the lake, where it would extend a drawbridge during daylight hours. During the last big war, when Prospit and Derse had clashed on the lake's very shores and King Daniel had lost his life and his hammer, the crocodiles had simply kept the bridge drawn and gone about their business. There were some crocodiles who'd been present on that very day that didn't even know the battle had happened.

The city had never been breached, and likely never would. Which is why they didn't care that a complete second city had sprung up all around, a rainbow colored tent city inhabited by maniacs, who had purchased all the booze and pie in the outlier villages and threw random shit into the lake to watch it burn. Hell, it was good for business; at least they paid for things, unlike other encamped armies they'd experienced. One entrepreneurial crocodile had even started up a business of selling things that burned very prettily, and the visitors/invaders(?) put on nightly fireworks shows by competing to see who could skip lumps of magnesium and mineral salts across the lava farthest. Plus, their leader'd had a reservation at the hotel for months now; they couldn't just turn the guy away, as long as the platinum kept right on coming.

Dave was sitting on the hotel balcony, reclining on a comfortable sun chair in full highblood regalia, sans makeup. He was eating grapes. They were sour and out of season but honestly he needed something that wasn't _completely_ sweet right now. He'd been out here killing time until he returned to Prospit. Obviously he was going to win the competition. Not only was he bringing back that war-hammer but also a brand new army. There's no faster way to a girl's heart than by expanding her territory and imposing peace on the vast lawless wasteland surrounding her kingdom. Hell, he should make her do something for him.

Someone knocked at the door; it was glass, so it shattered. Dave sighed, glaring over his sunglasses at the person standing there. Was it Aradia? Or maybe Kurloz? They both kept bothering him about responsibilities and suchlike; stupid nonsense mostly.

"Hello Dave," said Equius, sounding tired. "Are you aware that the city is being besieged?"

"Sup bro," he said trying not to sound eager or even surprised. "Don't worry about those guys though, they're cool. Well not cool," he clarified with a concise gesture, "but they're with me and I can't seem to get rid of them. Anyway, you should have said something before you broke my window. Do you know how much they charge to fuck up a hotel room? Musicians kept coming here and tossing the furniture into the lake so they imposed sanctions. It's uncivilized. Come on, sit down, let's shoot the shit."

Equius sat on another handy sun chair, which was immediately bent out of shape from his bulk. "Forgiveness, please," he said.

"Whatever," said Dave, looking around. "Where're the girls? You know they were hookers right?"

Equius growled. "I'm not an idiot. My mind is as strong as my body, if not moreso."

"Not to sound like I'm complementing you or anything but I doubt there's anything stronger than your body," Dave drawled. "Now stop dodging the question and tell me. If you're here it means you finished your quest right? Or did you just give up?"

Equius turned very blue. "Well," he began.

There was a sound between a hiss and a crackle accompanied by a bust of yellow-green lightning, and suddenly Eridan was there, along with a one-eyed crocodile and a very pretty girl with short silver hair, who looked like a troll except for her lack of horns. Equius fell out of his seat with startlement. Dave gave a lazy wave and said "sup."

"Hey losers," said Eridan happily, flashing his pointy teeth. "I don't care about the quest anymore so I figured I'd give one of you guys my treasure."

"If you don't care," asked Dave, "then why'd you get a treasure?"

"Because I know you guys failed miserably," he said self-importantly, throwing his cape around himself in what he must have thought was a dashing manner. The girl giggled. "I mean look at yourself Dave, you're dressed like a fuckin' savage."

"So is she from some obscure tribe where they cut off their horns and consider weird depressed hipsters to be the platonic ideal of masculine beauty?" Dave asked, sitting up lazily. He somehow looked even more relaxed than when he'd been laying down.

"Oops," said the girl. With another flash of yellow-green, a pair of spiraling troll-horns appeared on her head. "I always forget to put them on," she added embarrassedly. Suddenly an indignant green flush filled her cheeks. "And Eridan is a sweet boy!" She put her arm around his neck and kissed his cheek. "He just needs someone to tell him constantly."

"Yeah Dave," Eridan agreed, pointing a claw at him defensively. "And don't be harshin' my girl's horns. Callie is beautiful and you are just jealous! Anyway, here," he said, producing a gelatinous cube. "Whatever you guys might have found can't compete with this. It's a miracle cure. Brought me back from the brink of death."

The crocodile nakked. Eridan scowled. "Willoughby, just go jump in the fuckin' lake, why don't you? Just take a runnin' leap off this fuckin' balcony and fall into the fuckin' lake of fire! Then keep swimmin' until you drown because I know you would survive it otherwise!" The crocodile nipped his pantleg.

"Yeah, no," said Dave, reaching under his chair and pulling out the war-hammer as Eridan swore at his companion. The hammer glittered with golds and reds from the light of the lava. "It's King Daniel's war-hammer. Jade's daddy's lost treasure. Ain't no miracle cure in the world worth as much as sentimental value. I'm getting hitched for sure." He pointed at Equius, who was still sitting terrified on the floor. "Him though," said Dave, "he lost everything, including, apparently, his ladies."

Equius scrambled to his feet. "Silence, cur!" he boomed, the air warping a little. "You merely babbled so much that I couldn't tell you what had happened. I _exchanged_ my escorts for a treasure. They are currently residing with a subterranean society of batmen who worship them as goddesses."

"Cool," Dave intoned, not sounding convinced. "I threw my sword at a dude and his people made me their king."

"We stole a sandship and got exploded by pirates," said Eridan, helpfully. Equius growled, feeling like he was being made fun of.

"Minion!" he barked, "approach!" A tiny white figure emerged from the room, stepping cautiously over the glass. He was all white, and dressed in a multicolored scarf that was too big for him, and nothing else. It was just as well, as he had no features beyond a bulbous, perfectly spherical head. The creature had a self-important air. He gave a slight bow to Callie. "Greetings Calliope. How do the demands of your station suit you?"

She scoffed at him. "Better than they ever suited you, you shameless meddler."

"You know this…" Eridan hesitated, trying to find a word. "Guy?" he settled, lamely.

"Hey little man," said Dave, eyeing the thing suspiciously. "What's your name?"

"I have several," he said, examining his non-existent fingernails. "At the moment I am going by Mephistopheles."

"I've been calling him Minion," Equius explained, bearing his teeth at the creature. "As befits his station and infuriating nature. But he has his uses." He snapped his fingers. "Minion! Show us the princess!" He turned to Dave and said slightly more quietly, "he is all-knowing and can show us anywhere in the world." Calliope bent double trying to contain laughter, and Equius eyed her nervously, breaking out into a sweat.

"Oh, am I not in forty-thousand Hells, surrounded by such buffoons?" asked the homunculus, dramatically raising his hand to his forehead (for lack of a better term).

"Nak," agreed Willoughby.

"Thank you," said Minion emphatically. Equius took a step forward and he hurriedly took up position. His head shifted color, like drops of ink swirling into water. An image formed…

* * *

Author's Note: Dun! We're back, and we're staying back until this story is finished, you guys. I'm so excited. Thief of Prospit will not make it to the next month; I know, this will be sad, but on the other hand I will finally have _finished_ something!

More things were going to happen in this chapter than ended up happening, which is really my problem; I always come up with new ideas that push the old ones back, next chapter, I say, next chapter. Then it's five months later and the short novella is a two hundred page book and hasn't updated in nearly two months and I've got like, five series running at once and by the Sufferer where do I get time?

Feferi was originally supposed to die, but then I lost the scene where it happened and decided to do something different as I'd never be able to replicate the scene properly. Um, spoilers?

Doc Scratch is the little dude and I decided not to give him any variation of the name like I usually do and call him something completely different on the basis that in canon Doc Scratch is some kind of devil figure and is thusly named after the devil, whereas this Scratch is far too ineffectual for that. He has delusions of grandeur, but really he's just some imp rather than a big bad Satan.

This is the second longest chapter I have written for a work; the very longest is a certain one in Azure Conspiracies (available on Ao3!) that took me a single day and is one page longer.

The OCs were named! We've got Alppis Corhai, named by LordlyHour, Domenn Patria, named by rezi, and the Sage, named by polyfandrous. Rick Havoc was named by me, and Femaang 'Fang' Abata was also named by me. THE JOKE IS SHE IS LIKE AANG BUT A GIRL. Likely she will run off to some other nation once she's mastered Breath Waking, searching for a teacher in Light Playing, until she has mastered all the Aspects and can take on the evil Lord of Sick Fires. I might actually write that if I thought anyone would read it :P

Also no one donated an OC so the remaining ten Breathy dudes will remain nameless faceless blobs.


	10. The King Gives a Speech

John looked at the shimmering blue bubble floating in the air a few a foot from his face and saw his own reflection looking back at him. His hair was starting to turn dark again at the roots and he hadn't shaved in a while. Combined with his pale, blind eye, it lent him an altogether scruffy and well-used appearance, yet he was wearing richly blue robes and a golden breastplate. Tavros said it made him look like a warrior and told the people that he had suffered with them, and John had learned to follow the troll's advice, though rarely without giving a smart-alecky comment. John turned to look at his people, fourteen of his sixteen knights, and the ever loyal Villein who had refused a title. They were each dressed like him, though far less grandly, and were all heavily armed. Tavros himself was wielding both a heavy lance and a long-bladed spear; presumably the one was for stabbing and the other for slashing.

Domenn Patria looked at him, face full of barely restrained emotion. "It is time majesty," he hesitated. "The winds have had enough of waiting. They're angry." John sighed and his breath was visible. Not his Breath; the air had very suddenly become very cold in the past hour; many in the city would be suffering nosebleeds right now. Even without the Seer, er, _Listener's_ powers that Patria enjoyed, the troll could tell that they couldn't wait any longer. It was time to either take back their city or slink off into the shadows forever. John flashed a smile that he hoped was charismatic and turned back to the bubble. There were thousands like it all over the city, blown by the Sage, and they would relay his message simultaneously to every citizen. "Showtime," he whispered. Out loud, John said, _boomed_, "attention everyone. This is your king."

* * *

_ Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in—_

Barely listening, Jade searched desperately for John, and a small part of her was annoyed that the flying witch-girl was being ignored in favor of her brother's voice. Though, to be honest, she never thought he'd been much of a speaker but suddenly here he was (or rather _somewhere_, certainly not where Jade could see him), being _impressive_. Everyone, everywhere, had stopped what they were doing and started listening, some scared and confused, many of them considering, and not of few of them angry.

_ To the people of Prospit, I say _do not despair_. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the progress of sentient beings. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took—_

He sounded hurt, and she wondered if he was in pain. Zooming over the White King's Boulevard, she spotted Sollux standing near the spire of a restaurant, insectile cloak fluttering in the ever-quickening breeze, staff in hand. He was looking down at the crowd and…grinning.

_ —don't give yourselves to monsters! Men who despise you! Enslave you! Who regiment your lives—tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, iron men with iron minds and iron hearts! You are not _iron_! You are not _cattle_! You are men! You have love in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and—_

She flew down to him. "You need to help me find John!" Jade shouted, alighting clumsily on the rooftop, stumbling on a particularly hideous gargoyle. Sollux caught her with his telekinesis; she didn't like him using it on her. Straightening herself, she broke off from the purplish haze as quickly as she could. "He's going to get himself killed!"

"He's going to take back the city," Sollux smirked. "We need to find him alright, so we can join up with him. Look," he said, pointing into the streets and the stunned, silent crowds. They were all as one now, listening intently. "Do you know how stupid the concept of 'the people' is? Who the fuck are 'the people'? Everyone always says they're thinking about 'the people' but they can't possibly understand what everyone in even a little city like this wants or needs." Jade scoffed at Prospit being called a 'little city', or she would have if Sollux hadn't glared at her to stay quiet. "But your dumbass brother got it right. There isn't a single person in Prospit who isn't completely eating this up right now. Tomorrow they're going to have opinions and be individuals and all kinds of other annoying shit like that, but right now, they're _the people_." He chuckled at Jade's dumbstruck expression. "Have you even been listening to it?" Jade turned red and didn't answer.

_ —one man nor a group of men, but in _all_ sentient beings! In you! You, the people have the power, the power to create happiness! _You_, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure!_

_ Then let us use that power! Let us all unite. In the name of our kingdom, let us fight for a new world; a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, you have grown complacent but—_

"Who would have thought," Jade muttered to herself, disbelieving, "that the clowny little trickster had it in him?"

"To make a speech?" Sollux said, chuckling.

"To be a king."

* * *

John never thought that just talking could be exhausted, but here he was, nearly finished, and he was _drained_, physically and emotionally. They'd all written the thing together, even the Sage had dropped a few pearls of wisdom, but giving a speech was something altogether different from simply speaking, and John wished someone had told him that. Now it would probably amount to nothing, but dammit he needed to try. John heaved a sigh, and colored slightly once he heard it reverberate all across the city. Dammit. Too late. "By the grace of The Four, the Harmattan will come tonight, as a sign of my rightful rule. Look for me with the coming of the Harmattan."

The bubble dissipated, and John's knights applauded him. He ignored their cries of praise and turned to Tavros. "It's time for phase two," he said.

"We might not need it," Tavros said nervously, rubbing the back of his head, flinching as his lance fell to the floor without his hand to hold it up. "You were really, uh, _really_ good. Probably everyone in the city is more patriotic than Domenn now—"

John clapped him on the shoulder, never mind that he had to reach up to do it; it still served to patronize the big troll. "It was your idea," John insisted. "Why would you even suggest it if you didn't think you could do it?"

Tavros became very brown. "I never said I coul—"

"If you don't," John said reasonably, "then just think of all the people that are going to die."

Tavros was now the color of very good cocoa. He gulped hard and muttered something about trying before snapping off a surprisingly professional-looking salute.

* * *

Every winter, the Harmattan blows in from the frozen wastes of Derse, gaining speed as it charges across the desert into the heart of Prospit's territory. Usually it peters out before reaching the city, shrouding the countryside with fine, multicolored dust like a dense fog. In some years, when it fights against the monsoons, the wind stirs up tornadoes that flash and flicker with light and color as the lightning they generate reflects and ignites the Painted Dust, as if God Himself had descended to earth to chastise a particularly unfortunate man in his darkest hour, leaving destruction and extraordinarily beautiful lightning-glass in His wake.

It had never come in the early autumn, roaring across the plains like a hundred shrieking demons. Never before had it seemed so blue, as if the air itself were colored and not merely carrying desert dust. And certainly it had never seemed to form a fist as it slammed into the gates of Prospit with enough force to throw them open, shaking the walls to their foundations and shattering glass in the city center. But this year, it did, and Prospit's gates were breached, for the first time in her storied history, and by a trade wind at that.

* * *

Jack Noir was laid out in bed, dying of the plague. The Viceroyalty of Prospit had passed to the Draconian Dignitary, and it was he who sat the golden throne. The hall of the White King was enormous, _cyclopean_, to suit the needs of the ancient colossus that had once ruled here, its roof sustained by enormous statues of The Four that would have dwarfed even he, second only to the ones at the city gates. The matching statues of The Nobles in the palace of Derse, the Dignitary noted, would gaze down disapprovingly on the king. The king of Derse was not an autocrat but a warrior; the queen's agents had always managed the minutiae of government, and the king's place by divine mandate was always to serve the kingdom on the field against her enemies. But The Four were kindly and smiling, lending their benediction to any decisions made upon the sacred chair of Prospit. To simply sit in this throne, thought the Dignitary, was to hold absolute power, wasn't it? Who was this foreign queen then, to command _him_? And if the reports were correct, secret reports that only he had seen, kept secret by the sudden and violent execution of their reporters, Derse was gone, devoured at last by the deathly cold at the world's end.

And this little king, John Crocker and his _speech_. Utter schlock. Did he actually expect the mindless rabble to take up arms against Derse? If he was smart then he was just using it as a distraction, but the Draconian Dignitary had met the kid and knew that the idealistic little punk wasn't.

The Draconian Dignitary. The name didn't suit him anymore; it was time to cast off that old title. He was far beyond a dignitary now. The Draconian Dignitary was a dignitary no more—

The palace shook. A paladin, white shell gleaming under his golden armor, rushed up and offered a hurried bow. The Dignitary sneered; they had such lax discipline here, it sickened him. Of course, that laxity of discipline was what had allowed Derse to infiltrate the city so well. These weren't warriors or spies, but scholars and farmers. The paladin spoke. "My lord Viceroy, the gates have been breached."

"Explosives no doubt," said the Dignitary, thinking quickly. "I heard the blast from here. Seal the breach immediately. What army has Crocker paid off to do this, do you know? The Repub—"

"My lord," the Paladin interrupted and the Dignitary almost beat him to death with his scepter, but restrained himself. He wasn't an animal like Jack. The dignitary absently scratched himself. He was developing a rash on his neck. Damnation but it was itchy, and deep, like it extended far under his shell, down to the bones even. Hadn't…hadn't Jack—

The Dignitary cleared his throat. Clearly, the paladin was more than cowed, and so he gave the warrior his permission to resume speaking. The paladin coughed. "Well, it was not an army, as such. The king and his men—"

"Rebels," The Dignitary snapped. "They have taken up an insurrection against the true king. Me."

"Er," the paladin began, abandoning that train of thought as he saw the blood-crazed look in the man's eye and the hideous grey blotch on his neck. He was beginning to believe that no amount of platinum justified allowing this man to have come into power. "The rebels have infiltrated the armory and have started distributing weapons to the people. Riots are breaking out; they are killing Dersites on the Lunar Chain Street and in the industrial district." That blotch on the Dignitary's neck; well, the paladin's brother had gotten the same before shriveling up inside his shell as if he'd been drained of fluid, just another plague victim.

"The gate was a distraction," growled the Dignitary, jumping down from the throne, wielding his black, iron scepter like a saber. "They wanted us to divert troops there while he stirred up the rabble." He strolled past the paladin and began barking orders to the many awaiting courtiers, members of Dersite military structure and Prospitian sympathizers, petty merchants looking for wealth and classist old aristocrats wanting to 'purify' their city of the last century's innovations. The very people the paladin had hated most before the coup, he realized.

The group strolled out past the palace door and past the gardens with their beautiful golden roses. So many of them had been damaged in the seizure of the palace and the once immaculate lawn had been churned up into mud, stained interesting colors by the blood of multi-racial patriots. Lying on his back once, the paladin had thought the scene looked a bit like an eye, with the white hot orb of the sun for a pupil, the sky an iris, and the jagged skyline of Propsit all around the palace like a golden sclera. The eye was marred by a smudge of fresh smoke now, and the whole thing was dark and blinded, night falling early thanks to the Harmattan haze, come early too, now.

The rabble—the group of officials, he meant, was approaching the great front gates of the palace, opening up like an enormous, insectile mouth, its four leaves like triangular, razor-edged jaws.

If it was a mouth…and his party was leaving it…did that make them vomit?

The rabble though—he didn't feel the need to clarify this time as he glared at his richly robed superiors—were just chatting as they set out, leaving the relative safety to go out and see poor people bash each other's heads in. It occurred to the paladin that while Prospit had seen riots once or twice, it had never had an insurrection. They didn't know how to handle it. He almost warned them, but he didn't. And of course, if he didn't, then neither did any of the other Prospitian knights manning the gates, forming up with the group, leading the way. Maybe…if Crocker got his throne back…he would look favorably upon those knights that captured the insurrectionists, the invaders and collaborators, most of whom were conveniently gathered here just outside the palace…

The White King's Boulevard led down from the palace gate all the way to the cyclopean Eastern Gate. It was wide enough for a hundred men to march down side-by-side and gave a perfect view of The Four in their glory, their eyes scanning the horizon for their Noble siblings across the desert. Right now a strong, icy wind was howling down that street, blasting the party with colored dust in their eyes; many of them broke out into sickly coughs from the traces of desert powder and at least one developed a nosebleed from the sudden temperature change; the Dignitary's nose was _gushing _like a murder victim, but didn't seem to mind. Instead his eyes were fixed on the gate as if trying to bore holes in it through sheer force of will, and if it were any stronger the paladin was sure it would kill everything on the street.

Speaking of which, the street was empty. Odd. There should at least have been people running away, soldiers heading towards the fighting, and a few more barely visible in the distance trying to get the gates shut—

He finally saw someone; a Dersite soldier, his purple armor standing out against the yellows walls of Prospit. Something big and white was jumping down from the walls, grasping the soldier in its claws. A dozen more followed, and he could make out shapes now; huge animals, looking fierce and angry, eyes _inflamed_ with rage. Most of them were indistinguishable, but after thirty seconds an enormous spider, easily the size of the Great Seer's foot, eyes glowing a sinister cobalt, crawled down the wall, its spear-like legs clicking audibly against the stone even at this distance.

And then two seconds later an angry mob surged onto the boulevard from a side street as if they were a river breaching its levies, shrieking obscenities and the name of John Crocker. The paladin drew his sword; now was his chance, they were all still stunned. He raised the blade to the Dignitary's neck, ready to plunge it _right_ into the weeping, ugly rash—

But the Dignitary was gone. No, he'd simply moved, behind the paladin. The paladin had only a moment before the iron scepter was smashed down against his helmet. Head ringing like a bell, he reeled, completely ignoring the bellowing monster of a man as he smashed the scepter into the paladin's mouth, flooring him. The paladin hit the floor hard, dazed and barely able to move, gagging on teeth and bits of broken shell. Ugh, a blow like that would leave most of his kind with a Gloucester smile. But not him, because the Dignitary, with an animalistic shriek that belied his fencer's grace, rammed it into the paladin's eye, then the other, murdering him with both precision and ultra-violence.

* * *

Karkat woke up looking at the deep blue sky, lying on soft grass, with the scent of water and citrus in his nose. He sat up and scratched his head. "Shit I died and went to heaven." He scanned the area and saw a sight that filled him with horror; the siren from the grotto, now in troll form, sitting huddled under a blanket against a palm tree. She smiled and waved. Karkat shrieked. "YOU'RE HERE! THIS MUST BE THE OTHER PLACE!"

"By the Sufferer, Karkat," said Vriska, stepping into view leading both Maplehoof and Fuckslayer, "Do you have to be so melodramatic about everything?" Karkat raised an eyebrow. She was decked out in black and blue armor that vaguely resembled one of her old outfits, but more genuine somehow, as if this were the real thing and the other outfit had been an imitation. She also looked considerably healthier than she had before, taller even, as if she hadn't lived a hard life of malnutrition and disease on the streets; the tiny nicks and cuts on her horns had all disappeared, though they'd been so subtle Karkat didn't notice them until they were gone.

Vriska bit her lip. She had some idea of what her Moirail was thinking and wasn't sure she liked being scrutinized like that. "Get up," she hissed. "Both of you! You need to see this!" Karkat rose shakily to his feet, drawing his sickle and eyeing the sea-dweller warily. She bared her teeth at him. Or smiled. He could never tell with their kind.

The two of them awkwardly shuffled after Vriska and Karkat realized belatedly that they were in the oasis just outside the city; even without its looming pale bulk in the distance Karkat recognized the scent of citrons, which seemed so odd to him, so far from home. The three trolls and two riding-beasts stepped out from the shade and tightly packed earth of the oasis onto the fine dust of the Painted Desert; the difference was so great that the oasis was almost like an island out at sea. Immediately he heard the sound of the sea and the soft wing beats of distant angels. Directly ahead was the City of Wrath, built right up against its huge jagged monolith like a spear raised to the sky, a dozen angels circling its tip like sentinels, glowing white eggs imbedded in the stone at random. Karkat saw something that he hadn't noticed upon entering but seemed obvious now he and Vriska had been inside the city; it was lopsided. The builders must have nuzzled up around the monolith because it was the most solid ground in the area, but it wasn't nearly enough to support the thing and more than half of it was at a noticeable grade. The luminescent rainbow sand hugged right up against the walls and even blew into the city; side-gates here and there were half submerged already, and the beginning of a large crack was forming on the walls from top to bottom. In a matter of centuries, Karkat thought with a grin, decades even, the whole damned place would slide into the sea and the angels and their horrible kingdom would be no more.

"Not." Vriska growled, lifting up an old wooden box; there were a few barnacles growing on the underside. "Fucking." she smashed open the box with the pommel of her new sword; its fine quality made Karkat just a bit jealous. "Fast." she withdrew a handful of gleaming blue gems so bright Karkat's eyes widened; they seemed to glow with inner light. "Enoooooooough!"

Vriska threw them into the sand at her feet. Nothing happened. Karkat wondered if she had finally lost it. "Just wait," the sea-dweller whispered. He yelped and jumped about five feet—

A wave of blue force taller than the city walls rose up from the sand in front of Vriska's gems, parting it like the Ψiioniic parted the North Sea in legend. It surged at the city walls, gathering speed, growing in size and brightness, bringing with it a towering wake of rainbow colored dust that glowed with its reflected light, until the whole thing slammed into the wall, breaking against it like an ocean wave breaking on a rocky shore. And then it happened again, and again, and five more times, each time widening the rift in the walls, each time shaking the city to its foundations, toppling buildings and sending angels skyward in panic until finally, on the eighth blow, the City of Wrath issued a groan. It sounded like a dying man. Slowly, but gaining speed, it began to slide into the ocean.

It took an hour, a time that Karkat felt was too fast and at the same time far too slow, before the whole wretched thing crumbled and rolled into the ocean. Cities were not meant to move and very little of it was recognizable as a structure afterwards. The shrieks of a thousand drowning angels filled his head, and were suddenly silenced. The water churned, not only with the falling stones but heat and light, discharge created as the angels collided with the salt water. At last there was a great scream that Karkat actually physically felt, like standing on a gigantic drum that someone had pounded on once with all their hate, and the remaining angels fell from the sky. Some landed in the soft powder; others splattered themselves across the trail of rubble. One landed right at Karkat's feet; its light was gone. The angel was dead. Karkat kicked its head with disgust; it burst like a rotten melon.

Feferi was jumping with joy. "You guys are awesome," she said, hugging Vriska. She growled. "What are going to do next?" asked Feferi, oblivious.

"You aren't our friend, chick," Karkat said at last, leveling his sickle at her. "I distinctly recall you killing me, and then healing me, so you could kill me again, or something dumb like that. I don't know what you've done to make Vriska trust you but I'm putting a stop to it!" He turned to Vriska, who was busily ignoring him and picking up her gems. "You must be being controlled somehow, because as epic as that was just now, you totally just sank our only chance of winning the stupid challenge."

Karkat are you an idiot," she said at last, not really asking at all, jewels glowing in the palm of her hand. Karkat realized that they were eight-sided dice. "This is the treasure! Magic dice that can give you anything you want! Who cares about all the fucking platinum and pearls and dumb shit like that!?"

Karkat considered for a moment. "Okay, now I _know_ you're being controlled!" With a loud battle-cry, he lifted his sickle over his head and charged at Feferi. Vriska smacked the weapon out of his hand and hugged him so tightly it popped his back. "Just think for once you moron," she said, _mumbling_. "Our quest is _oooooooover_. No pap me before I start blubbering." Hand shaking with uncertainty, he gently touched her cheek, and felt her slump against him.

Vriska threw the dice again, demanding to be taken home. The two disappeared in a flash of light, and Feferi turned back to the oasis, stumbling through the dust, ready to taste fresh water for the first time in centuries.

* * *

Author's Note: Two more chapters, guys. The next one is going to be extra long, don't worry. All the things are going to go down. All of them. This one is a bit short considering how long I spent working on it but that is simply a matter of my being busy with a variety of things, both dull and not-so-dull. Plot twist; the final boss is DD, who gives a shit?

The OCs of course have their own classes, in case I ever use them in a more standard Homestuck fic (or if anyone wants to rent them out). Domenn Patria is a Seer of Breath and the Breath whispers portents in his ears; Alppis Cohrai is a Knight, Rick Havoc is a Prince, Fang Abata is a Witch (and also the Avatar, master of all Aspects but that's not important at all) and the Sage is a Mage.

The Harmattan is a North African trade wind; this world's geography is loosely based on North Africa if you hadn't noticed (you probably hadn't); the world's end is roughly in the same location as the Red Sea, the North Sea is the Mediterranean and the Painted Desert is the Sahara, although it doesn't extend from coast to coast, as there are forests and marshes west of Prospit. The Beforan Republic is tropical, like equatorial Africa. I'm merely restating things I've already said to help you get the picture.

Before you start praising me about John's speech, know that I lifted it from a Charlie Chaplain movie, _The Great Dictator_. See it here: watch?v=6FMNFvKEy4c&feature=player_embedded#!, it's good. My reaction was pretty much the same as Jade's; I didn't know the clowny little trickster had it in him.


End file.
